


you bring my heart to its knees

by cantheysuffer



Series: Loki Likes That AU we Write [1]
Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst, Bad BDSM Etiquette, Berserker Thor, Bloodplay, Bottom Loki, Bottom Thor, Chains, Consensual Sex, Death Wish, Dom Loki, Fingering, Genderfluid Loki, Happy Ending, Intersex Loki, Jötunn Loki, King Thor, Loki Does What He Wants, Loki Underestimates Thor, M/M, Manipulative Loki, Oral Sex, Porn With Plot, Sadomasochist Loki, Sex in a straight jacket, Sexual Violence, Stabbing, Sub Thor, Thor Is Afraid He Can't Control Himself, Thor Is Not Stupid, Top Loki, Top Thor, Using Sex as a Ploy to Kill Someone, Vaginal Sex, dubcon, poor fandral
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-17
Updated: 2014-04-08
Packaged: 2018-01-04 21:46:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 30,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1086039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cantheysuffer/pseuds/cantheysuffer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Destroying Thor is Loki's biggest turn on, a sure suicide mission with enough risk to make it the perfect conquest. The height of Thor's power throws the would be king to his knees, binding the brothers together through their mutual fantasies of self-destruction. </i>
</p><p>It starts out as a creative punishment: trick Thor into spilling his secrets in a dream, but Thor's secrets are darker than Loki imagined and they aren't easily manipulated. Loki's plan traps him in Thor's dreams where he must spend every night as the Jötun warprize of the berserker king. Loki finds he likes being the one punished for a change, but he won't let Thor in on how real his fantasies have become until Thor learns his place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the [prompt](http://lokis-gspot.tumblr.com/post/58036486688/thorki-want-loki-has-dubcon-fantasies-about-being): "Loki has dubcon fantasies about being raised jotun and captured by warrior Thor and forced to become Thor’s bed trophy. In other words he likes that au we write a lot" and [this](http://takemetothedungeons.tumblr.com/post/69188197821/you-look-in-my-eyes-im-stripped-of-my-pride-and) giftset of Thor and Loki.
> 
> The title is from "Not Strong Enough" by [Apocalyptica](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5O90uzvUA4).
> 
> I'm going to be very careful with how I represent Loki as intersex and Jötun because I love where these tropes can go, but I am also aware of what they can do. [This](http://cantheysuffer.tumblr.com/post/70334068546/jotun-loki-101-or-why-your-favourite-intersex-indian) post has great information on that.
> 
> The majority of the fic is Loki-centric and it will take a while before we get into properly exploring and appreciating Thor's point of view and place in all of this.
> 
> This is my first attempt at fanfiction! Comments and kudos are greatly appreciated.

“It is dangerous,” the librarian said. 

“How fitting. So am I,” Loki replied. 

The familiar burn of ice shot through Loki's body, pooling in his fingertips. The book's cover frosted over in the librarian's hands. Loki grabbed for it. They both held one end, eyes locked over the book in a tug and war. Loki's eyes narrowed in a threat. 

Thor swung an arm around Loki's back and ruffled his dark hair with a gargantuan palm. Loki's shoulders shot up like a bristling kitten, ruining the effect.

“There is no doubt of that!” Thor boomed. Loki smelled the mead on his breath. His nose wrinkled. 

“You may read the book if it remains in the library at all times.” The librarian scowled, prying Loki's fingers off one by one. 

“That is very reasonable, is it not brother?” Thor interjected with a wide grin. 

“Very.” Loki's voice was clipped. “How reasonable, that you allow me to read a book from the palace library.” He flung out the last two words as they soured in his mouth.

“Loki,” Thor warned.

“A palace I am a prince in. A prince who was your king. How reasonable that you allow me to read a book I own.” 

“owned,” the librarian corrected.

“Oh?” 

“The king owns the books. Even on Midgard you are not a king.” The librarian scoffed.

Loki's eyebrows shot up. 

Thor grabbed Loki's arms, pinning them against the sorcerer's body. Mjölnir pressed over Loki's hands as an opportune binding. 

“Nervous, brother?” Loki said, tone even and composed. He tilted his face until Thor's breath steamed across his lips. 

“No.” 

“I am not one of your maidens Thor.” With each word Loki moved his face towards Thor's until they were so close that the next precisely enunciated phrase would close the distance with a kiss. 

“No?” Thor's pursed lips stifled his chuckle.

“I am not interested in being manhandled by your hammer.” Loki paused to make a show of contemplating it. “Or at least not until you purchase me dinner first.” 

Thor shoved Loki back with a laugh. “You jest.” He grinned. 

“Do I?” 

“To disarm me.” 

“I'm impressed.”

“You have miscalculated your audience, brother. But come, let us try another round. This one in the ring.”

“And you have miscalculated yours,” Loki said flatly. 

“I would rather test how dangerous you are where your precious books will not bare the cost,” Thor reasoned. 

“And you think your brain can bare the cost of my driving your head into the ground?” Loki smiled. 

“You just said you were impressed.” Thor crossed his arms over his chest smugly.

“Little behind on the uptake brother.” Loki pointed to his own chest with his index finger. “God of lies,” He purred. 

“Well then I will just have to beat an impression into you,” Thor teased.

“If you can hold onto me long enough to do so.” Loki shrugged. By the time his shoulders settled down again he had vanished. 

“Huh.” Thor's eyebrows knitted together as he turned in a circle.

With the sweep of his invisible hand Loki silenced his movements. He flopped into a comfy chair, legs propped up on a table to watch the show. 

The librarian rolled her eyes. She muttered under her breath, returning the book to its shelf before leaving. 

Thor turned around again. He wrung his hands together nervously. He glanced around the library. Not a single head was turned in his direction. Thor approached the shelf confidently. 

He pulled out the book Loki and the librarian had argued over. It fell open to a random page in Thor's hands. It was written in a language he did not recognize. Thor's face fell. Invisibly, Loki smirked. 

Thor tucked the book into the folds of his cloak and hurried from the library. 

Loki stood up very slowly, knees threatening to give. He gaped after his retreating brother. 

Loki's face was perfectly composed again as he rematerialized into sight. He stalked out of the library, taking a sharp right turn and prowling down a corridor that swiftly led him out of the castle. 

The sparring ring that Thor and Loki had tussled in during their youth was set further back than the rest. Loki strode through the other rings, green eyes narrowed and set ahead. The clamour of swords on shields muffled as the prince moved past. If the fighters noticed their breath began to escape as smoke or that their ears were flushed with the red threat of frostbite they did not comment. Only a few bold heads turned to watch the prince pass. Foolish maybe. Loki had been known to anger over less. The air was still frigid long after Loki had moved on. 

Loki's footsteps echoed in the last ring, each one amplified against the silence. He disturbed the circular pattern a servant had left in the dirt when last cleaning the ring. Mopping up the blood. That had been months ago. Only Thor and Loki used this ring, though Thor's foolish friends would sometimes sit and jeer from the stands. “Cheat,” Hogun muttered the last time Loki used his magic to appear behind Thor. 

For some unknown reason Hogun found the back of his trousers glued to the bench when he tried to stand. Volstagg and Fandral attempted to release him carefully, pulling slowly and peeling the fabric back one inch at a time. Sif stomped over and yanked Hogun to his feet. The back of Hogun's trousers tore clean off. He had been less inclined to sit during the fights after that. 

Everyone but Sif had somewhere they suddenly needed to be that prevented them from fetching a new pair of pants for Hogun. Even though Sif knew the palace very well, every door she went through brought her into a corridor that looked remarkably like the one she had entered last. She couldn't tell what the corridor looked like back through the same door until she closed it and she swore she was in the same corridor again. 

Thor found her snoring in a hay bale in the stables the next morning. Sif could never quite figure out when she had eventually stumbled outside. 

The wall Hogun was leaning against temporarily turned to mush one day. “Terrible foundation problems,” Loki explained with a concerned frown. Fandral fell into the mush trying to pull his friend out. They both stank like rotting eggplants for weeks. Thor's friends stopped coming to watch the brothers spar after that. “What was the final straw?” Loki winked at Sif as he passed her one day in the dining hall. 

Loki walked up the winding path to sprawl on the empty spectator benches. He basked in his well earned solitude with a deep sigh. Legs splayed wide, head back, Loki's eyes closed against the sun. 

It didn't take more than ten minutes for an expected shadow to fall across Loki's pale face. He resisted asking if Thor had gotten lost, feigning disinterest by ignoring him instead. 

“You came.” Thor's voice was careful. Loki's stomach fluttered. He let out a practised sigh to veil the surge of satisfaction he felt at predicting Thor's actions. At leading his brother into a corner. 

Loki cracked an eye open. “If that is the tone of voice that often accompanies those words, your exploits are greatly exaggerated brother,” he said stiffly.

Thor laughed. “Join me,” he said, retreating into the ring. 

Loki stood with liquid grace. He held his hand out to inspect his nails, smiling wide and slow in approval. Thor tapped Mjölnir's handle against the ground impatiently. 

Loki ran a hand back through his already slick hair, drawing out the motion. The tapping became louder and more insistent. Loki tossed his head back as if under a waterfall, letting out a keening sigh that sounded more like a moan as his eyes rolled up to connect with Thor's across the ring. “Ready?” Loki called out with a hazy smile.

“Aye, but you will not be able -” Thor's words cut short when Loki disappeared again. 

Loki appeared behind Thor, a staff materializing into his hand. Loki brought his left arm around to swing the staff into Thor's neck. He drew it back, choking off his brother's air flow. 

Thor fell to his knees, throwing Loki forward. Loki would have landed on the ground in front of Thor, but at the last second Thor threw Mjölnir to the ground. Loki was blasted backwards by the hammer. 

Thor launched himself forward, closing the gap effortlessly. He pinned Loki before he got up again. 

They wrestled in the dirt, flailing and rolling. It ended with Loki flat on his back and his brother straddling his hips. 

“Give in?” Thor panted. He shoved Mjölnir into Loki's stomach to trap him. 

“Aye, you do,” Loki's voice said, but it did not come from the man below Thor. 

The clone crumpled into smoke and seidr beneath Thor. 

The real Loki's sudden appearance above Thor forced Thor flat on his stomach, Mjölnir trapped beneath his chest. Loki sunk a knee into the small of Thor's back, balancing himself by wrapping a hand around the back of Thor's neck. 

Thunder roared in the distance. A bolt of lightning threateningly struck the ground a foot to their left. 

“Do it,” Loki hissed into Thor's ear. 

“You were right. I give in,” Thor said, no longer struggling. “Your clones are becoming more convincing.”

“You allowed me to best you,” Loki's voice was low and dangerous. 

“No,” Thor said. Loki yanked on Thor's hair, tugging his head back at a painful angle. “Perhaps I do not fight you as viciously as I would a real opponent Loki, but I cannot.” Thor's voice was strained. 

“I have no wish to harm you brother,” Thor whispered. 

Loki released his grip on Thor's hair. His fingers ghosted over Thor's skull to stroke his brother's golden hair. Loki jerked backwards, betrayed by his own hand, and stood hurriedly. 

Loki held out his hand and Thor took it to get to his feet. 

Loki tucked a single loose strand of hair behind his ear. He was otherwise unaffected by their scuffle. The clone had taken the brunt of it. Loki's green eyes slid lazily over Thor, appraising the mud covered clothes and his unkempt appearance. The single scratch running down the side of Thor's face.

“The feeling is not mutual,” Loki whispered. Thor leaned in to hear him. 

A dagger appeared in Loki's hand the second before he thrust it into Thor's stomach. Loki turned and walked away without a word. 

Thor doubled over, clutching the wound. He unleashed a thunderous, ugly, roar. Loki skipped a little quicker up the castle steps. 

Later Loki entered Frigga's garden under the cover of nightfall, guided only by a charmed firefly that hovered by his face. He identified the necessary herbs by touch and smell and shoved them into a sack hidden under his cloak. Loki did not linger. 

Loki pilfered a kettle and a pair of cups without anyone the wiser. The kitchen staff were gone for the night. He made it to Thor's chamber without interruption.

Loki knocked on the door and waited. “Thor?” 

“Thor!” Loki called again. He resisted the urge to simply magic himself into the room. 

He clenched and unclenched his hands into fists as he waited. Being over eager would set off the wrong mood. Too concerned about their earlier scuffle? Thor would be wary. As he should be. 

Eventually he heard Thor's heavy footsteps. Loki stifled a grin, schooling his face into nothingness. Thor unlocked the door and opened it. 

“Loki,” he greeted his brother coolly. 

“You missed dinner,” Loki said flatly. Thor would have hidden away in his chamber to nurse his wound. Ever predictable. 

“No. I ate quickly. You simply did not see me,” Thor lied. His mouth twitched, not quite up to it.

“That is unlike you.” Loki played along.

“Worry is unlike you.” Thor snorted. 

“Do not mistake my presence for worry Thor. You would be sorely disappointed.” Loki smiled. 

“Why are you here then?” 

“I did not say I would tell you.” Loki shrugged, pushing past Thor to walk into his chambers. The pretence of deception, for deception, was an art. 

Loki placed the stolen kettle on a metal shelf in front of the fireplace. He upended the bag of herbs into the kettle all at once. With a gesture the kettle was filled with water and on its way to boiling. 

The herbs would fight. It was a horrible combination. Thor would not realize what he was actually drinking because he would down it while pretending to like the drink. To protect Loki's feelings. No matter how deeply Loki turned the blade, this he could count on. 

“Lavender, chamomile, mint.” Loki said without turning around. He felt the weight of Thor's gaze on his back. 

“For stress,” Thor said softly.

“You paid attention during mother's lessons.” The praise was chiding and cruel from Loki's lips. 

“Do not mock me brother,” Thor sighed as he sat down on the edge of his bed. 

“Do I?” Loki smiled, turning around to regard his brother. Thor had not missed sleep and yet there were dark circles already under his eyes. Loki would take care of that tonight. 

“Always.” 

“Then you should be used to it.” 

“I prefer your other qualities.”

“Which ones?” 

“Let us not begin this game of words brother.” Thor frowned. “I concede.”

“It has not even yet begun,” Loki laughed.

“I know better than to play against you.” 

“Do you?” 

“I let you into my chamber.” Thor said. Loki arched a single eyebrow, prompting him. “There is no use standing in your way when you will always get past in the end.”

“And what of earlier?” 

“Mother's lessons are not the only ones I pay attention to,” Thor brooded. 

“I'm impressed.”

“Nay, you are not.” Thor said simply. 

The kettle let out a faint whine to announce that tea reaching its boiling point. Loki poured the tea for Thor and himself. He chilled the cups with a single thought, frost gathering on the handles. 

“Quite right,” Loki said as he crossed the room and held out a cup.

Thor took the cup carefully. He sniffed the tea, shockingly bright blue eyes watching Loki over the rim. Eventually he abandoned his hesitation and downed the tea as a shot.

Loki sipped passively, refilling Thor's cup every few minutes. The silence stretched awkwardly between them. 

“I have something of yours,” Thor said eventually. Loki felt a brief pang of uncertainty, perhaps guilt, until his eyes followed Thor's gesture to the dagger on his bedside table. Not the book. His stomach unclenched. 

“Thank you. I am glad to see it here,” Loki lied. At the moment he would have rather had it returned by pulling it from Thor's corpse. The god of mischief stood to retrieve his weapon. By the time Loki sat down again Thor was passed out on the bed, snoring loudly. 

Loki watched Thor sleep as he finished his tea. He sipped slowly. It was the tea, not the watching, that made Loki take his time. So he thought repeatedly to himself. 

When Loki finished his tongue darted out over his lips to savour the last of the tea. It had been disgusting. Loki abandoned the cup on the bedside table where Thor had left the dagger for him. “I will ensure you sleep well, brother,” Loki purred.

The fire went out with a sizzle of seidr, bathing them in shadow and moonlight streaming through the curtains. Loki left those open. The door locked with a thud, latch closing and ice encasing the hinge should anyone have a key. 

When Loki was confident they would not be disturbed he climbed onto the bed next to Thor. 

Thor's eyelids were fluttering and he was sweating with mental exertion. The dream had begun. The tea had taken its toll. Thor was experiencing a particularly potent conscious dream, not that he would ever realize what that meant or the danger therein.

Loki lay down on his back, just close enough so that their shoulders were touching on the bed. He took Thor's hand in his own. The gesture felt strange after so long, their fingers intertwining like puzzle pieces. Loki tried to ignore it as he waited for his own tea to take effect. 

Just as he felt himself began to drift off Loki muttered a spell. He gripped Thor's hand tighter, anchoring them together through the physical contact. When next Loki opened his eyes the trickster knew he would be in Thor's dream. The knowledge gave him comfort and he drifted off to sleep with the confidence of a fool. 

\----

Thor brought Mjölnir down through the skull of another frost giant. The beast stumbled forward, brain flooding the white snow before the body hit the ground. Thor laughed, adjusting his grip on the hammer. 

The icy winds of Jötunheim whipped Thor's hair in his face. He threw his head back, screaming out a battle cry as he leaped through the air and slammed Mjölnir into the ground. A wide circle cast around him and ten more frost giants fell. 

“Who's next?” Thor roared into the fray. 

Thor tread the dangerous edge of a berserker rage. His blood pounded in his ears, flushing his face red and slick with sweat. 

“Thor!” Fandral screamed, narrowly avoiding Mjölnir when he accidentally crowded in too close to the reach of Thor's swing. 

Thor shoved past his friend, stabbing Mjölnir's handle into the frost giant's neck that Fandral had been duelling. Thor impaled the frost giant before ripping Mjölnir out and beheading the corpse. 

“Going to leave any for us?” Volstagg's laughter was lost on Thor.

Thunder clapped once in the distance. The only warning. Clouds moved in swiftly to black out the skies and the battlefield was cast into darkness. 

Thor moved through the pitch, illuminated by the occasional touchdown of lightning that shook the ground and made it quake. 

The winds increased to a perilous speed while Thor milled down the remaining giants. The rest of the Aesir had fallen back, past the treeline and out of the worst of the growing storm. 

“Thor!” Sif called out, her voice lost under the roaring winds. 

“That oaf,” Loki muttered from within the Aesir line. 

At the sudden sound, a dozen weapons were pointed at the unfamiliar frost giant amongst the Aesir. Fandral swore he had not been there a second before. 

The frost giant vanished before any of the Aesir could pull their jaws up for long enough to attack him. He was remarkably small. The stranger had been no more than six feet, Volstagg only sure he had been a frost giant at all by the blue sheen to his skin and the bloodied red colour of his eyes. 

The storm raged. A few trees were uprooted and flung into the winds, circling around Thor at a deadly speed. 

Loki reappeared in the eye of the storm. He did not have time to marvel at his Jötun form. Though he had known for centuries what he must truly look like, the shapeshifter covered the alien skin with every opportunity. The Aesir illusion of pale flesh and green eyes had been stripped from Loki when he entered the dream. He suspected Thor had something to do with it. That and the remarkably scant clothing. 

Thor was swinging Mjölnir around at top speed high above his head and had not reacted to his brother's sudden presence. “You best be conscious enough to tell me where that book is,” Loki muttered to himself under his breath. 

“Thor!” Loki shouted. His lip twitched once when he received no reply. 

Not one for subtlety, Loki pulled the dagger out of his cloak and shoved it into Thor's stomach. 

Thor reacted instantly, whipping Mjölnir into Loki. Loki was launched backwards and hit the ground with a thud. This time there was no clone to take the fall. He let out a huff to cover his wince as his head dropped back, eyes closing in irritation.

Thor's stomping shook the ground. “You really should -” Loki never finished the sentence. Thor dropped Mjölnir onto his stomach and backhanded him. Loki's eyes shot open as his skin rung with the slap. 

The look in Thor's eyes made Loki's face pale. “What -” Thor hit him again, this time with a full fist.

Loki spat out the blood dripping into his mouth. For the first time he wasn't confident that he was safe with Thor. A cool shudder involuntarily ran down Loki's spine. He was unable to hold back the choked sigh that followed. Loki noted his sudden arousal and moved on with the cool disposition of a gynaecologist, no longer surprised by his traitorous body. 

Thor picked Mjölnir up and swung the hammer down. Loki was gone, the hammer creating a fissure where the god of mischief had been a heartbeat before. Thor fell to his knees and roared. 

Loki appeared behind him, stamping his heel into the back of Thor's skull. 

Thor fell face first into the snow. He grabbed for Mjölnir. 

“Don't,” Loki warned, pressing the dagger to Thor's throat. 

Thor's hand tensed on Mjölnir. Loki plunged the dagger into Thor's shoulder. 

Loki cursed his own costly hesitation, his unwillingness to bring the blade home, when Mjölnir whipped back into his face. Loki collapsed onto his back. 

He was blinking blood out of his eyes as Mjölnir came down again like a meat cleaver, smashing into his ribs. Loki screamed when he felt one shatter. 

Suddenly Thor was standing again. Who knew when that happened? Probably not even Thor. 

“Is this how it ends, brother?” Loki whispered with a bloodied smile, staring into Thor's glassy eyes. They were empty of all recognition. He might as well have been blind. 

In a single move Thor was on top of Loki, pummelling him with his fists. 

“You oaf,” Loki choked, knowing how lucky he was that his brother wanted to beat him to death now. Mjölnir was abandoned a few feet away in the snow. 

Loki couldn't push himself up, the snow slick with blood. Thor's blood. Thor's face was paling. What Loki had mistaken for his own body going numb was actually his brother's fists no longer hitting as hard. 

Loki flung a blast of raw seidr at Thor. It threw him back a few feet.

The flying trees crashed to the ground all around them. The wind completely stopped. Loki propped himself up on his elbows. Thor wasn't moving. 

“Thor?!” Loki screamed as he scrambled towards him, slipping in the blood. 

The Aesir army closed in. Loki didn't even notice, falling to his knees and shaking Thor frantically. He didn't register it when someone slipped a pair of handcuffs on him.

“Get away from him!” someone screamed. Hogun yanked on Loki's chains and his hands jerked backwards. 

Instead of unleashing green seidr fire at his attacker, the fire Loki tried to fling outwards couldn't escape the boundary of his hands. It scalded, roaring up and down the wrong side of Loki's skin and tearing up his veins. Loki shrieked. 

His eyes raced down to his hands, bound in cuffs laced with seidr containment runes. Loki closed his eyes and imagined ice. A forgotten world of winter. Frost giants. The Casket. Loki didn't have the chance to figure out if it would work.

“Thor's breathing!” Sif shouted. 

Loki's eyes sprung open. 

“He is passed out, asleep,” Sif sighed in relief. 

“No!” Loki shouted. “Wake him up!” he seethed, pulling on his chains, only to be flung onto his back with Hogun's boot on his neck. 

With the handcuffs still on Loki couldn't force himself to wake up, but Thor probably already had.


	2. II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “And how does this berserker rage end?” Loki played along, biting into his lip to restrain from rolling his eyes. Of course Thor's dream would be all about him and all of his emotions. Here he could kill anyone and not have Odin chide him. He could kill everyone. 
> 
> “There is no end. It is always just below the surface, laying in wait to be kindled by the spark of battle.”
> 
> “Well how does Thor snap out of it?”
> 
> “Last time he collapsed from sheer exhaustion.” 
> 
> “Not so bad,” Loki mused.
> 
> “After seven years.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for casual mentions of suicide and rape, but neither will happen in this fic.

“Wake up Thor!” Loki shrieked. He had probably rolled over in bed to find Loki holding his hand. Spooning his brother with how his luck often turned, drooling contently on the pillow. Would it be worse if Loki were the big spoon or the little spoon? He screamed again. 

Loki thrashed underneath Hogun's boot. “Get off of me!” he hissed, grabbing Hogun's foot and yanking forward. Hogun landed on Loki's stomach, knocking the air out of both of them. Even in handcuffs, Loki flipped them and was on the warrior instantly. 

“The prisoner!” someone shouted. 

Loki felt unfamiliar hands on his shoulders, dragging him backward and forcing him to his feet. Hands held Loki up by his armpits as his knees gave, not letting go when he finally stood.

Sif stopped in front of him with a furrowed brow. “I do not know why you care so much about waking King Thor when it is you that knocked him unconscious, but rest be assured when he does wake you will be the first one he asks to see,” she said it like a threat, lips pursed and taut. 

“King Thor?” Loki gasped out in laughter. “So in his dreams he is king, and where am I?”

“I have never seen you before in my life,” Sif said.

“Right,” Loki replied curtly. “Of course.” Written out of existence, except when he invaded Thor's precious fantasies. 

Loki said nothing as Sif arranged for him to be led to the tent set up for prisoners. Only Fandral volunteered to escort him. Hogun was still rubbing his back and muttering. Sif forced a few of the lower ranking warriors to accompany Fandral and Loki. Their faces paled in spite of the cold, blood abandoning them with their last remaining confidence. 

“Just a few extra precautions, nothing to worry about,” Fandral said softly, for Loki's benefit, as he attached cuffs to Loki's feet and snapped one around his waist. The final piece of bondage, a collar, was connected by a chain in a long line to the seidr binding handcuffs Loki already wore. 

“Is this Thor's idea of foreplay?” Loki muttered in disbelief, holding out his hands so the chains clinked together. 

Fandral laughed, handing a chain each to the six Aesir that shuffled nervously around them. Fandral held onto the chain that went from Loki's neck to his hands, giving the makeshift leash a tug before he started walking. Loki's face set in a hard line but he remained silent. 

They paused at the prisoner's tent, white and indistinguishable from the rest. From a distance it was invisible against the snow. Fandral held aside the flap as Loki and the warriors fumbled through the narrow entrance. 

Loki counted ten beds before he glanced back at Fandral. The absence of other prisoners hung in the air like a heavy weight, their brains spilling out on the snow plains outside. “Suppose I have a room to myself then,” Loki said. 

“Aye. Usually we have a few tent fulls of prisoners. We take them in as soon as they surrender.”

“Did they surrender this time? Did they even have the chance before that oaf drove his hammer through them, drunk on his own glory?” Loki bristled. 

Frandral attached Loki's chains to a post by the nearest bed, locking them in place. “You are dismissed, leave us.” The warriors hustled out the door and all but vanished before Fandral had finished the sentence.

“That is not glory, what you saw. It is a rage,” Fandral's voice was low.

“I have rage too.” Loki leaned closer, locking Fandral's eyes with his own searing crimson ones. “So much rage,” He purred. 

Fandral blinked, ignoring him. “In a berserker state there is nothing but rage. No enemies, no friends, no honour, no values, nothing.” He shuddered. “Only the sheer determination to unleash the anger.”

“And how does this berserker rage end?” Loki played along, biting into his lip to restrain from rolling his eyes. Of course Thor's dream would be all about him and all of his emotions. Here he could kill anyone and not have Odin chide him. He could kill everyone. 

“There is no end. It is always just below the surface, laying in wait to be kindled by the spark of battle.”

“Well how does Thor snap out of it?”

“Last time he collapsed from sheer exhaustion.” 

“Not so bad,” Loki mused.

“After seven years.” 

Loki frowned, uncertain of how time passed in dreams. Was this just a story Fandral was meant to tell because Thor's unconscious mind willed it, or had Thor been having the same dream for seven years? Had he gone to sleep every night to live out a berserker rage? A sibling with a closer bond could have said. Loki's eyebrows furrowed. 

“He destroyed entire villages. We lost count after eighteen. He just showed up from house to house, ripping down front doors, grabbing anyone he saw.... well you saw what he does,” Fandral said gravely.

“How long was he in a berserker state before I knocked him unconscious?”

“We have been in battle for two weeks and he has been slipping in and out of the rage for hours at a time. It was different this time...” Fandral shook his head. “We are fortunate. He only had time to fell the frost giant invasion. He caused only three or four casualties on our side.” Was it better they not keep track?

“Invasion? Are we not on Jötunheim?” Loki hissed. Fandral stared at him as if he did not truly see him. As if he was not really there. Neither of them were. Perhaps the dream was slipping as Thor remained conscious and awake. “Never mind,” Loki snapped. “When will he wake?”

“Before the end of the day.” 

Loki nodded. The damage had already been done in the first minute of Thor passing out. He could afford to be patient. 

“If you need anything, call for me,” Fandral said.

“And what, you will get it? At the beck and call of a prisoner?” Loki sneered, tugging on his chains. 

“If you ask nicely,” Fandral said with a wink as he exited the tent. 

Loki sat down with a huff, taking in the tent completely for the first time. There were twelve beds in total, the one he was shackled to closest to the door. The chains allowed him to walk in a radius of four feet, not that it mattered with nothing but beds and cloth in the tent. 

He pulled the sheets from the bed, testing if they reached the ceiling. If Loki went on his tiptoes and swung the sheets around the plank running through the centre of the tent, the sheets were just long enough to hang himself. Not his first choice, but Loki was practical. He replaced the sheets on the bed and smoothed them.

Loki collapsed onto his back on the bed. After a minute he raised his hands, turning them over slowly as he inspected them. They were the same shape he was accustomed to, marred only by unfamiliar ridges. It was the colour that unnerved him: shocking blue. Bright and deep and luscious. Rich. The colour of the ocean and the sky in ecstatic union. 

Even though Loki could not see them, he knew his eyes were blood. The veins were bare and raw, stripped of all the green pigment that concealed them in his Aesir form. 

Loki trailed his fingers up his body, only giving himself a nasty shock when his Aesir illusion of pale flesh failed. He bit his tongue to muffle a yelp.

Loki frowned as he inspected his clothing, or lack thereof. He wore no shirt. Something to ask Thor about. Loki's upper torso was bared, darkened by an aubergine bruise that swelled outwards from the rib Thor had shattered with Mjölnir. 

His fingers traced the rest of his body, seeking out bruises and scrapes. They slid into his loose coal shorts deftly, freezing in place at an unfamiliar curve. Too soft to be the ridges that marked the rest of his body. 

Loki glanced back at the tent flap, closed and still. He scampered under the bed sheets, shucking his shorts and underwear off with frenzied hands and heels. They pooled discarded around his thighs, trapped by the impractically skin tight boots Loki found himself in. 

That he was exploring his body like a hormone fuelled adolescent was not lost on Loki, but he avoided blushing as his fingers traced an unfamiliar protrusion of flesh. A groove surrounded by nearly symmetrical lips and on its way to becoming velvet smooth as he rubbed his finger back and forth. 

Loki shoved the sheets completely over his head, but he could not contort enough to properly make out what was just behind his familiar dick. He continued to explore with his fingers, one slipping in past the slicked groove and to brush against the surface of a hole. “Oh,” he said softly in surprise. 

“OH!” Louder this time when the finger went in, quickly darting back out again. So that was definitely a vagina. 

“Hello?” 

Loki's head jolted up, ramming into the tucked sheets he huddled under. “Hnnnghh!” His voice was muffled.

Loki's face breached the surface of the sheets. He yanked his underwear and shorts back on, failing to move the sheets as little as possible. 

Thor stood in the doorway, one foot still hovering outside. He shifted his weight awkwardly.

“You interrupted my nap,” Loki said flatly. 

Thor glanced from the blankets back to Loki's eyes and chose to not say anything. Loki had never thought him more clearheaded and brilliant than he did right then. 

“My apologies. I did not intend to,” Thor said as he approached the bed. Loki shoved the sheets off and slid off the bed, keeping it between him and Thor. “I...” Thor paused, frowning. 

Loki backed up a foot. The chains clunked when they reached their limit.

Thor held up his hands. “I did not intend to startle you, or worry you. I mean you no harm.” The dark circles under his eyes were still there. He looked deflated. “I only wanted to thank you,” Thor said softly.

“For what?” Loki bristled.

“You stopped me.” His eyes were wide and haunted. “You stopped me before I hurt anyone else,” he whispered. 

“Fantastic,” Loki snapped. “Now unchain me and we are even,” he said, shoving his bound hands across the bed. 

“I wish I could, but I cannot do that. You are dangerous.” Thor shook his head sadly. 

“Oh, now you get it you big oaf,” Loki hissed.

“Pardon?”

“Nothing.” 

“Oaf...” The ghost of a smile appeared on Thor's face. “Only one calls me by that. Even your face, the angles of it... you like quite like him actually, like my brother.”

Brother? Loki fought to keep his face blank. Did Thor really think of him as his brother when in Thor's wildest dreams he imagined Loki with a vagina? As intersex? 

It changed little, almost nothing. Loki had never been overly attached to his genitals. Pieces of skin he understood through a culture that deemed him a him because of his dick. Him was a convenient word others used to refer to him, to categorize him, but it had always been a secret untruth. It grasped and failed to hold onto reality for Loki had never felt particularly male. He did not feel particularly anything. What had changed, had revealed itself, was that this mattered to Thor in some unknown way. Some unspeakable way, for now. A liesmith always finds their words. 

“He must be brilliant, this brother of yours,” Loki purred.

“Like you I suspect, his intelligence is only surpassed by his arrogance,” Thor smirked.

“Oh? And where is he? I should like to meet him.”

“Not here,” Thor's smirk fell. 

“When did you last see him?” Was he in any compromising positions? 

“The other night,” Thor's face was closed off. “What did you say your name was?”

“I did not say,”

“Well, what is it?”

“Ghdufnglg,” Loki muttered the first incoherent string of letters that came to mind.

“That is beautiful, very exotic.”

“Yes, in my language it means none of your concern.” Loki bit his bottom lip to hold back the laugh burning his throat at the dirty look Thor shot him. 

“I will find out soon enough, little prince. I will find out everything about you,” Thor promised. Loki's eyes widened. “Oh? Did not realize we know you are one of Laufey's sons? Do not worry. I know exactly what prize I have.” 

“Laufey's son?” Loki choked out the name he had not heard in a long time. 

Thor leaned across the bed between them to grab the chain that connected Loki's collar to his handcuffs. “Do not test me. I am grateful for the violence you have spared this realm, but I am not one to be trifled with.” Thunder boomed in the distance. 

“Very well, I will tell you my name,” Loki said slowly, leaning in to Thor's grip on the chain. 

“It is Loki,” he purred. Thor jerked backwards, scalded by the words. With the sudden slack on the chain Loki fell forward, face first on the bed.

Loki picked himself up unceremoniously, Thor rubbing his arms as if he could wipe out the name from his ears. 

“Did I surprise you somehow, my majesty?” Loki said, preening himself as he smoothed back his hair black and slick as oil spills. The face beneath was contorted in a mask of innocence and concern just as deadly.

“Nay,” 

“Thor!” Sif called out as she ducked her head and entered the tent. “Oh good, this one is still alive. Fandral will enjoy the news,” Sif said sarcastically as she rolled her eyes. 

Thor turned around, pointedly putting his back to Loki. “Why will Fandral enjoy that?”

“We are dividing up the loot we received from the war. He is the only prisoner and Fandral claims he called dibs.” Sif shook her head. “I do not know what this dibs is, he says he heard it from some Stark.” 

Loki's head sunk into his palm. The chains clinking caused both Thor and Sif to glance in his direction.

“Oh do go on, do not worry about my precious sensibilities. Please, continue to discuss my impending rape in my presence,” Loki said acridly. 

“Rape?!” Thor shouted.

“Well I would not submit to his advances willingly.” Loki made a disgusted face. 

“I will not allow anyone to rape my....” Thor's mouth hung open mid sentence. “Loki. Yes that is his name, and he is mine.” Thor continued after a pause of several seconds. He nodded to himself, as if to affirm the rightness of what he had just said. 

Thor stomped out of the tent. 

Sif unlocked Loki from the post his chains had been secured to, eyes narrowing as she dared him to give her trouble. 

Loki followed obediently as Sif led him towards the centre of the camp, grateful she was not tugging on his chains like a leash. They hung loose and dragged along the floor. An unconcealed blade at her hip caught the light, Sif's right hand hovering above it. He couldn't win them all. 

“- and it is only fitting that I take Loki as mine as he is the only one who has been able to pull me from the berserker rage. He will be necessary to me, to all of us, should it happen again.” Thor was stating his case to Fandral, Volstagg, Hogun, and a few Aesir warriors who lounged about. 

“By knocking you unconscious!” Hogun countered.

“Better than any of you have done,” Loki smirked. The group fell silent as they turned to regard him. 

“Have your Jötun whore, what should any of us care?” A warrior said. 

“Do you mean to insult me because you have no respect for women and so you align me with them because you can think of no greater insult or are you so uncomfortable with the masculinity your culture demands of you that you demean me so you are not denigrated for not wanting to rape me yourself?” Loki asked with a disconcerting smile. 

“Shut your mouth prisoner!” The warrior shouted.

“Make me,” Loki winked.

The warrior rounded on Loki and swung a fist at him. 

Loki narrowly avoided getting hit by darting to the side. He moaned, clutching his ribs and leaning in to Sif to keep from falling over. Under the veil of distraction his fingers lifted the dagger from Sif's waist. 

The warrior's next punch landed, connecting with Loki's nose. The hit lost its force as Loki embedded the dagger in the warrior's chest. He stumbled backwards, clutching at his wound. 

Fandral held his hands up in resignation, stepping backwards.

“All yours,” Sif said to Thor with a smirk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case it was not clear, Loki's opinions on gender are canon divergent.


	3. III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki leaned into Thor, his lips hovering beside his brother's ear. “I am going to desecrate you, god of Thunder.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter in particular was inspired by [Lokizillas' lovely thoughts about Thor](http://lokizillas.tumblr.com/post/70440457496/i-saw-your-tags-about-how-powerful-thor-is-and-i-just). They are always a joy to read.

Thor announced they were returning to Asgard that day. 

All of the Jötun army, save one, were dead. The frost giants were left where they fell. No burning pyres were lit, no boats sent off waterfalls. There was to be no funeral. By the time the last tent was packed the corpses had frozen to the ground, their blood crystallizing to glisten like jewelry in the dying light.

Thor led Loki to a waiting horse. Thor unlocked and removed most of his chains, leaving only Loki's collar, the seidr binding handcuffs, and the makeshift leash that ran between them. 

“I will not be able to ride a horse like this,” Loki said flatly as Thor helped him onto the animal's back. He winced at the surge of pain from his ribs, unfriendly and raw.

Thor gracefully swung upwards, landing with a thump behind his brother. 

“What gave you the impression I was letting you out of my sight?” Thor laughed. He clenched his thighs around Loki and slid his hands around his waist to grab hold of the reigns. 

Loki snorted to cover the sudden increase in his heart rate. 

The bifrost took them in a blinding rainbow blur. 

Thor bowed his head to the gatekeeper, urging the horse along with a nudge. 

When they reached the rainbow bridge Thor raised his heel and gave a soft kick, the horse bolting into a canter. 

A servant waiting at the castle took the horse. He kept glancing over his shoulder at them as he left, worrying his lip as he stared at Loki.

“Hm,” Thor said aloud.

“Your brain is so out of practice I can hear it working,” Loki chided him. 

Thor laughed and shook his head. He led them down an ill used passage that curved away from the main hall. Loki arched an eyebrow but said nothing. 

They stopped in front of Thor's chambers and he unlocked the door with a key from his pocket. 

Loki slipped inside to circle the room, surprised when he saw nothing out of place. 

“Why am I here?” Loki snapped. 

Thor sat on the edge of the bed to take off his boots. “I suspected you would prefer it to the dungeons. You can sleep on the couch,” Thor said, gesturing to it. 

“Like a lap dog?” Loki bristled. 

“I do not see it that way, but if you do I cannot prevent that,” Thor said calmly. He slipped off his socks, rolling them into a ball and tossing them to the side of the room. 

Loki rounded on him, approaching the bed and stopping when their knees touched. He towered over Thor who was still sitting. Loki ached to rip that calm voice to shreds. To desecrate Thor's vocal chords until everything he said came out in a raspy whine.

“and how do you see it?” Loki's eyes narrowed. “How do you see me!” Loki shouted. 

“Stop yelling,” Thor commanded. 

“ANSWER ME!” Loki hissed, hands balling into fists. 

“You are a prince and you saved hundreds of lives on the battlefield today. I will not let you rot in a cell where they will gawk and jeer at you,” Thor grit his teeth as he spoke, his jaw set. 

“So this is honour? Am I honourable, or do you just feel guilty?” Loki laughed hoarsely. 

Thunder boomed in the distance. Loki ignored it. 

“Hundreds of lives? Thor, you would have killed thousands!”

The room flashed white and stank of ozone. Loki could feel the electricity thick and solid, razing his skin. 

“I will NOT be your pet when YOU are the monster!” Loki snarled. 

“STOP!” Thor roared. He shoved Loki backwards, gasping for air. 

Rain beat the windows, the wind screaming outside. Thunder and lightning clashed again, simultaneously. 

Loki felt a pang of pleasure uncurl in his stomach, his arousal tripped along with his fear. His hands were burning. His face heating up as his vision swayed, giddy with the rush. 

“FIGHT ME!” Loki screamed back. 

A fist sized chunk of hail slammed through the window, shattering it. Water poured into the room through the hole, drenching the curtains. 

Thor slid to his knees on the floor, hyper ventilating. Tears stung his eyes and ravaged his red skin. Thor's teeth chattered furiously as he trembled. 

Loki stalked closer, grabbing Thor's blonde hair and yanking his head back. Loki slipped his foot in between Thor's legs so he could bring their faces inches apart. “LOOK AT ME!” Loki demanded. 

Thor's eyes flung open, the blue irises almost completely blacked out by his dilated pupils. Loki felt Thor's erection against his foot.

“Is this what you want?” Loki laughed in disbelief. “The king of Asgard pants after being on his knees.”

The rain coming in through the broken window had soaked the floor boards and Thor's pants were drenched. Thor remained where he was, their gazes locked. Loki grinned.

“Tell me Thor,” Loki purred as he towered above him. Loki slowly rubbed his foot back and forth over Thor's crotch, his cock hardening further at the attention.

The winds continued to roar outside but Thor was silent. His shaking mostly subsided.

“Tell me how you want me to undo you, break you down so you will never be able to be bad again because I will own you,” Loki yanked on Thor's hair again.

“I want your consent, I want you to beg me to end you,” Loki hissed through gritted teeth. 

“Yes,” Thor whispered. 

“Louder,” Loki snarled. 

The room vibrated with electricity and thunder exploded, cracking out again with a crash.

Loki laughed in his face.

“Please,” Thor said softly 

“Good enough for now. We will teach you manners later,” Loki purred. 

Loki leaned into Thor, his lips hovering beside his brother's ear. “I am going to desecrate you, god of Thunder.” 

Thor tried to stifle a moan, but it came out strangled and needy. Loki bit into Thor's neck, drawing blood. Electricity surged through the room, a lamp exploding on the bedside table.

Loki forced Thor onto his back on the bed, yanking him by his hair into place. Loki's face was set in a hard line to obscure the shivers of pain that tormented him, tight and hot in his ribs and searing across the rest of his body like roots.

“Remove these,” Loki demanded, shoving his handcuffs in Thor's face. 

“I cannot,” Thor whispered. 

The next few seconds were very tense. Loki's face did not change at all. “Very well,” Loki said eventually. “I will just have to make up for it,” he threatened. 

“Off,” Loki snapped, bloody eyes trailing down Thor's pants. 

Thor hastily undid his belt. He kicked his pants off and removed his shirt. 

“Up,” Loki gestured with his chin. Thor scrambled backwards on the bed and lay down obediently on his back. 

“Your safe word is Mjölnir. If you want me to stop, you say it,” Loki's voice was flat as he crawled onto the bed. He bit into his bottom lip to hold back the moan of pain, a thrumming presence as constant as his heart beat but jarring and raw when he moved suddenly. Loki prowled on his hands and knees, climbing on top of Thor. Even chained and bound he was fluid as a panther. 

Thor gulped, adam's apple bobbing in his throat. 

“Do you understand?” Loki said patiently. His even tone and empty face did not match the dangerous smile. 

“Yes,” Thor whispered.

“What is your safe word?” Loki asked as he raked his nails down Thor's bare stomach. 

“Mjölnir,” Thor shuddered. 

Thunder rattled the windows and hung thick in the air, an invisible animal pacing the chamber that had become its cage. 

“Very good,” The praise sounded like chiding from the trickster's lips. 

Loki kissed Thor, a clash of teeth and tongues. 

His nails carved down Thor's chest and stomach, digging into his ass. Thor bucked his hips up, straining cock just brushing against Loki's. 

Loki sunk his nails into Thor's hips. “Patience,” he rasped into Thor's mouth. 

Thor grabbed Loki's collar and dragged him another kiss, back arching up as his legs wrapped around Loki's waist. He bucked into the front of Loki's shorts. Loki hissed in pain, disjointed from his careful and liquid movements meant to preserve his injury. 

Loki tore his head away and backhanded Thor across the face. Thor shuddered and the room surged blue. The smack was not as strong as it would have been had Loki been unchained, but the handcuffs left a nasty red imprint. 

Loki narrowed his eyes, waiting. 

“On your stomach,” Loki finally demanded as he slid off his brother. Thor rolled over onto his stomach, peering up at Loki as his face pressed to the left. 

“If you had lube, where would you keep it?” Loki asked as he slipped off the bed and began to pace the room. 

“Bedside table I reckon,” Thor said. The pounding rain outside the broken window nearly drowned out his soft voice. 

Loki opened the bedside table and pulled out a bottle of lube. 

“I did not put that there.” Thor frowned.

“No need to be modest,” Loki purred as he slid back onto the bed and ran his fingers over Thor's ass. 

“Not modest, I just do not recall placing that there,” Thor's eyebrows furrowed. 

Loki smacked his ass. “Silent,” he snapped. 

He opened the lid and poured a little lube onto his fingers. “This is your dream Thor, you just need to want something and it happens,” Loki reminded him as he traced the outside of Thor's hole with his slick fingers. “Why else do you think I am here, in chains, doing this to you?”

“I did not wish -” Thor's voice cut off, replaced by a sharp gasp as Loki plunged a finger inside without warning. 

“No talking,” Loki purred. He slid his finger back and forth, shallowly breaching the hole again and again. Loki could feel Thor's ass clench around him. 

“Do you know your safe word?” Loki asked.

“Mjölnir,” Thor groaned.

“Do you want to use it?”

“No.”

Loki shoved his finger in as far as it would go, pulling out slowly. He sunk two fingers in for the next thrust. 

“Hurt?” Loki purred as he scissored his fingers, pushing against Thor's tense flesh from the inside. 

“Yes,” Thor panted. 

“Bound to happen with these handcuffs,” Loki said innocently as he shoved a third finger inside. His other hand just barely reached around to brush against Thor's balls before gripping the base of his brother's cock. 

Loki slid his dry hand up and down the base of Thor's cock in rhythm with his fingers, pulling in and out slowly. He felt Thor's cock harden against his palm as he canted his hips back into Loki's fingers, trying to get his brother to stroke the sensitive head. 

Loki's hand closed tightly around Thor's cock, stopping him from moving back any further. “On your stomach,” Loki ordered. 

Thor settled back into his stomach, trapping his cock beneath him. Loki slid his hand behind Thor to brace himself on his brother's ass as he plunged his fingers into him, thrusting aggressively. Loki felt the ring of muscle loosen ever so slightly around his grip.

“Ngh,” Thor moaned. 

“What was that?” Loki asked as he slid his fingers out punishingly slow. Thor did not respond. 

“Stay,” Loki said, slapping Thor's ass lightly as he pulled his fingers out. 

Loki slid off the bed and stepped out of his shorts easily, keeping on the thigh high boots that he would not be able to undo. 

He grabbed a pillow from the front of the bed and shoved it under Thor's hips, angling his ass up. Loki slid behind his brother and slicked up his cock with lube, stroking himself a few times. 

Loki guided his cock to his brother's hole and thrust inside with the snap of his hips. Lightning slashed through the room. Loki closed his eyes and slid deeper inside, pulling out so slowly he was almost trembling. 

Loki shoved back inside, fucking his brother lazily. Languidly. 

When Thor pushed back to meet Loki's thrust Loki leaned forward onto Thor's back, slipping the chain that bound his hands together under Thor's neck. Loki's hands held onto Thor's shoulders. He fucked him faster, riding Thor with his hips and cock as the chain pressed softly into Thor's neck. With every moment Loki could feel his ribs digging where they could not go, one rough and broken like shards of glass inside his skin. 

Thor's panting grew louder, back arching against Loki's front as he pushed his hips back to meet every thrust. 

“Loki,” Thor moaned softly. Loki smashed his cock into his brother, fast and rough. Lighting and thunder tore through the room, tearing at Loki's skin. Loki bucked into his brother, panting as he felt the skin on his arms sear. 

“Fuck, THOR!” Loki shouted as a jolt of electricity ripped through his core, causing him to come violently, slamming into Thor to ride out the wave of power. 

Loki's body tingled all over, nerves on fire. Eventually he slipped the chain over Thor's neck, pulling out of him slowly. 

“Roll over,” Loki said hoarsely. 

Thor's cock was red and straining, streaked with precome. 

“I will take care of you this time, but next time you are going to come just by riding me,” Loki promised as he brought his lips down to his brother's cock. 

Loki slid Thor's cock in as far as he could manage before sliding it back out. His tongue darted across the top, swirling before he slid down again, allowing his brother to fuck his mouth. He sped up his pace, hollowing out his checks and tightening his lips as he went up and down. 

Thor came with a shout. 

Loki fell onto his back, laughing softly to himself.

Thor's panting filled the room. The electricity was gone. The storm outside ended. 

“All good?” Loki said, brushing his hands across Thor's blonde hair. Thor nodded. “Need a minute, or are you fine?” Loki asked. 

“Fine,” Thor responded.

“Perhaps I will try that instead of knocking you unconscious next time you go into the berserker rage,” Loki purred smugly as he brought the blankets over himself and snuggled under them without bothering to clean himself off. Thor's sheets, let him deal with the mess. 

Thor lifted up the sheet to get under it. 

“Ah ah ah,” Loki tutted. “You get the couch.” He turned his back to Thor. “I do not share and I most certainly do not cuddle.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The power in my house went out while I was writing about Loki coming. It was very startling, to say the least.
> 
> This chapter received minor edits after posting. I'm still getting used to continuity heh.


	4. IV

Loki woke to Thor snoring loudly beside him. He moved to shove his brother off the bed with a snarl and hiss that he did not share, but jerked still at the sight of his own hands. Loki's usual illusion of pale Aesir flesh hid his Jötun skin. He turned them over slowly. Loki's hands stole into his pants, gripping his cock. There was no vagina nestled behind it. 

Loki slipped off the bed cautiously. He collected his boots and walked backwards, eyes fixed on Thor as he made for the door. The ice jamming the door vanished with a wave of his hand. Loki exited the room and bolted down the hall. 

He escaped to his own chambers where he paced in solitude, wearing perfect circles into the floorboards. The nervous tension rode his body. Like electricity. Loki shuddered. 

A knock interrupted Loki's aimless thought chasing. “What?” He snarled.

“Brother?” Thor's voice was muffled through the door. 

Loki froze. He made for the balcony in his room just as Thor opened the door. 

“Out here,” Loki called, casually leaning against the railing. 

He forced his face into emptiness lost on his narrowed eyes, darting over Thor in scalding agitation. “What if I was indecent? What is not an invitation to barge into my room,” Loki hissed. 

“Are you ever decent?” Thor asked. 

Loki's face warmed as blood rushed up his checks. In the light of day the memories shifted uncomfortably. Too tight, suffocating in his own skin. 

Loki turned to give Thor only his profile, wild green eyes staring into the gardens beneath his balcony. “Never,” Loki purred, the anxiety jumping his nerves barred from his steely voice. 

“What occupies your mind brother?” Thor asked, leaning against the railing next to his brother. 

“Perceptive.”

“I would take that as a compliment, but you are always thinking Loki,” Thor's smile warmed his soft voice. 

“You are a sentimental oaf.”

“Only for you.”

Loki's eyes widened in horror as he couldn't stop himself from ripping his gaze from the garden to wrap around Thor. Drowning in his muscles. His body so dangerously close. Choking in the scent of him: ozone and the rain before it fell. Thor's blue eyes raked over his body openly in return. Loki's hands trembled on the railing.

“I was thinking about what it would have been like, had I been raised Jötun.” Loki's voice was hard.

“What?”

“If Odin had not taken me and allowed me to be raised by the Jötuns like I was born to be. Raised by Laufey.” 

“Loki... father adopted you. He saved you from dying in the snow.”

“What Jötun dies in the snow?” Loki scoffed. “Do you think we freeze Thor? Do you think that even if I was buck naked, aside from a cloak of ice, that I would freeze?” Loki drew his face closer to Thor, baring his teeth in a snarl. “Or would I just look more like the monster I am? That this illusion disguises,” he spat. 

Thor grabbed Loki's arms. “You are not a monster,” Thor whispered earnestly as he pressed their foreheads dangerously close. 

“I would burn you if you did this when my skin was blue. If you touched me in my true form.” Loki whispered back furiously, closing his eyes. “My flesh would rip yours apart.”

“No Loki, it would not.”

“You are wrong. I would - I would destroy you.” Loki stammered, stumbling over the words he meant to wound. 

“Stop this foolishness,” Thor pleaded gently. 

Loki's eyes snapped open with conviction, trapping Thor's pupils with his own predatory ones. “God of Thunder or not Thor, I would desecrate you should I be raised Jötun.”

Thor leaned in, jerking backwards the second before their lips surged together. Loki blinked owlishly. 

“Nothing would be different if you were raised Jötun Loki,” Thor said stiffly but earnestly. “Nothing.”

“Of course it would. But you are right, it would not be that way. I would not be in any position to fight you. I would be Prince to a fallen kingdom.” Loki frowned as he returned to gazing out into the gardens. “We would not be brothers Thor. That would be different.” He sighed. “Imagine that. If Odin had not taken me, I should be your slave.”

“You are my brother, Loki.” His voice shook. 

“Blood says otherwise.” Loki shrugged. “Imagine, the strange Jötun sorcerer, a menace and yet... you have always been drawn to monsters. Would you take me if we were not brothers? Save my life and ask for me as your warprize?” Loki laughed. “What would you give up for me - and then what would you do with me? Fuck me or just kill me?” Loki's voice was lost and far away. 

“Those are not the only options,” Thor said quickly.

“Oh, but they are, if I were raised Jötun. If you want to be generous... how does that Midgardian game go? Fuck, kill, or marry? Is that it?” Loki smiled as Thor's face fell. Loki laughed. “There, you can have another option Thor. Never say I am unkind.”

Thor did not reply, his face set in a hard line. 

“Do you not want to pick?” Loki scoffed. He drummed his fingers across the railing. “You never said, why did you come? Why are you here?”

“I was worried something was wrong with you,” Thor's voice was haunted. 

“The last time I saw you-” “I was offering you tea.” Loki interrupted him. 

Loki gestured down to his own body. “Anyways, perfectly fine as you can see. Did you get sick from the tea?”

“Nay.”

“Then why should something be wrong with me?” 

“I... had a dream.”

“Relaxing teas will do that to you.” Loki shrugged.

“I always dream. This time was different. You were different.” Thor moved as if he was about to grab Loki, but he stopped himself and rooted his hand to the railing. His knuckles went white.

“Well as you can see,” Loki said as he placed a hand to his hip indignantly, “I am not different.”

“I know something happened.”

“Well that is a surprise. Perhaps I should mark it in my calendar. We can have a feast on this day next year. A celebration in honour of the event that Thor knew _something_.” 

Thor's eyebrows furrowed and he frowned. “You do not believe me,” he sighed. 

Loki rolled his eyes and tried to still his hammering heart. “Well, is there any part of the story you are leaving out?”

“Nay,” Thor replied sadly. 

“What did you dream about, that you were so convinced something was wrong?”

“Nothing... nothing you would be interested in brother.” 

“Very well.” Loki smiled cruelly. “If it cannot be explained by the content of the dreams, maybe it is the dreams themselves. Perhaps you have been cursed to have such dreams.”

“Who would curse me?”

Loki shrugged, “It need not be a curse laid on you by a person. You could have gone down a corridor you were not meant to. Taken an object from its place. Read a book you were not supposed to...” Loki trailed off insistently. 

“Are there many cursed objects around the palace?” Thor's breath hitched. 

“Not many... but they are far too easy to come by. Do you recall that book the librarian would not let me leave with? That one is cursed, but why would leaving it in the library help anyone? Even just reading it if the reader is not worthy and does not understand the language it is written in they will-” Loki paused and shook his head. “Why am I telling you this? It is excruciatingly horrible. Not a thing for morning discussions and certainly not anything you need to know.” 

“No, go on,” Thor urged him. Loki arched an eyebrow. “I should know about the cursed objects around the palace so when I am king... I mean-” Thor frowned. 

Loki patted him on the shoulder. “It is fine Thor, I know you will be king,” he purred with a rogue smile. The lie rolled off his tongue like retribution. “Well, the curse is clever. No one that it affects would know it is there as it is written in the same tongue as the rest of the book.”

“What does the curse do exactly?”

“First the curses searches for a thing a person most prizes and shows it to them. It could be in a dream or a hallucination, which is why this one came to mind. Not that you read the book.” Loki said gently. “Anyways. Then the curse takes what has been shown and rips it from them. So say....” 

Loki paused to glance at Thor and his lip quirked. “a warrior tried to read the book. Well a warrior is a complex person, there is no way to tell exactly what the book would do. Perhaps it would show him a myriad of things he prizes to better pick which one to destroy. It might show him a future where he is a great warlord, make him king, or give him the person he most desires.”

“Then what?” 

“I do not know... I imagine warriors prize their strength.” Loki rolled his eyes. “So even if that warrior just skimmed the book, his hair would begin to grow as he became effeminate-”

Thor cut him off. “Why would his hair grow? Sif is as fine a warrior as any man, more so than most, and she has long hair and is a woman.” 

Loki pretended to be picking at his nails. “Maybe the book is sexist.” Thor's face blanched. 

“So... the hair begins to grow. That might be the first sign of the curse, aye?” Thor urged him on.

“Aye. It can happen a day after reading the book or maybe five days after. Cursed objects are not specific. Maybe they have a sense of humour.” He grinned. “So the person that read the book would have to be wary because they may not have read enough to be cursed, but if they were they ought to catch it right away.”

“How would they catch it?”

“Well the hair. And also if they were losing their strength the second sign would be that their bone structure would also become slimmer, more dainty, more effeminate.” Loki held up his hand to inspect it. “So they must check mirrors often to ensure that their hair was not growing and their bone structure not changing.” 

Loki drummed his fingers along the railing. “They should check a mirror every thirty minutes, to be safe.” 

Loki bit his bottom lip to avoid laughing as he caught Thor's eyes steal to the bathroom door beyond them.

“What happens after the warrior's hair grows and their facial features become more feminine?” Thor asked, forcing himself to look back at Loki.

“Well, when it grows long enough their cock just falls right off.”

“NO!” Thor shouted. Loki gently raised an eyebrow again at the outburst. “What... what a terrible thing to happen to any warrior,” Thor stuttered. 

“Indeed. But no matter. I am the only one that has any interest in that book and I cannot be cursed.” 

“If someone... was cursed. You said it was best to find out as soon as possible. Could they be uncursed?” Thor asked. 

“Well.” Loki paused for emphasis. “If the entire curse took its course, probably not. If someone was foolish enough to read that book the back pages might explain how to undo it. I could read them, undo the curse perhaps.” Loki held his brother's gaze for a moment as he said this. “Yes, they should just bring the book to me.”

“I tire of telling you stories Thor.” Loki yawned for emphasis and stretched, arching off the railing and prowling back into his chambers.

“Ah... well thank you for that one, brother,” Thor said softly. “I will see you later, perhaps at dinner.”

“Perhaps.”

Thor was paler than usual as Loki disappeared into the bathroom. Loki slammed the door shut before his brother could steal a glance at the mirror. 

As soon as the door closed Thor bolted from the room. When he was certain he was alone, Loki allowed himself to burst out laughing.


	5. V

Loki allowed Thor one hour of liberated paranoia. One hour to abandon his surely fleeting interest in the stolen book and surrender to Loki's better judgement. As the clock marked time in its calculated ticking Loki lay sprawled across his bed, curling and stretching in the soft comforter. Rolling out his stiff muscles from the night bound to Thor's side. Loki hummed to himself, falling still eventually in the noonday sun streaming through the curtains. Sated by the pleasure of foreplay.

The clock chimed the arrival of an hour. The heralding call. The commencement of Loki's hunt, marked thereafter by the relentless pace of his heart. All exhibition for the spectacle of carnage. In a typical hunt the foxes never knew what was happening. Only their participation was required - better if it was unwilling. Better indeed, Loki thought with a cruel smile. 

The father of hel and hound tracked his prey with acumen. Though he could not penetrate Thor's mind, Loki knew his brother's habits. He stalked through the fighting rings unseen. Thor was not in the stables either, his horse still in her stall. Thor had not tucked himself away in his chambers. A spark of seidr veiled by the back of Loki's palm unlocked the door. He hesitated upon clearing the room, moving on after a heartbeat. Though he might find the book should he search Thor's chambers, it was well beyond that now. Loki craved the gestures of Thor returning his prize: Thor's askance, broken, eyes. His defeated shoulder slouch. The tilted skull of the would be king, no longer upright enough to hold a crown. 

Loki made short work of the diversion. The distraction meant to buy Thor time to break of his own will and offer it up whole to a better master. Loki found him in the banquet hall within the hour. 

No festivities were planned and yet the hall was flooded with food, spilling off every table in bounty. Thor sat at the front of the hall, flanked by Sif and Fandral. The group of them were thick in conversation. Thor ripped into a golden apple wholeheartedly.

No attention was spared for Thor's ignorance of the overture. With a mutter Loki covered himself in seidr, spilling over his body like living liquid. Moulding his shape until he stood as a woman, sharp face ripped into a dangerous smile. His body shifted so naturally it was as if Loki were a thing between states. Always both at the same time. Never quite complete. Shifting. Becoming. Not necessarily trapped by his body, but by the notion that his body was one thing in its entirety. Confined to the words he had not chosen. 

Loki stomped through the great hall to the main table. Asgard his catwalk crushed beneath five inch heels. Loki towered over Thor as he leaned over his shoulder. 

“Brother!” Thor greeted him exuberantly. 

Loki moved to put the table between them, standing in front of Thor. Loki's hand trailed over his own chest, resting suggestively over the curve before resuming tucking his hair behind his shoulder. 

“Loki,” Thor corrected himself with a smile. 

Loki's eyebrows twitched in irritation. “Oh? Am I not your brother in this form?” His voice came out slow and precise. 

“You have not changed shape in a great deal of time. I was merely surprised to see you do so now,” Thor said earnestly. 

Sif bristled beside Thor, ever irritated by Loki's deceptions. Fandral's gaze was affixed to Loki's chest - the rest of the realm fallen into the void for all he cared. 

“Why do you take on this shape now?” Thor asked, nudging Fandral with his elbow. Fandral smacked Thor away distractedly. 

“Would you prefer another?” Loki said coolly.

Without waiting for a response the Aesir illusion was eaten away by a surge of cold. Loki's pale flesh corroded and decayed into the spectacular blue of his Jötun form. Loki's eyes curdled to blood, pupils contracting in mute fury. Fandral jerked backward and fell off his chair. 

Loki stalked towards Fandral, throwing the chair backwards. It froze in mid air - shattering into a thousand pieces when it hit the wall. Twin horns rose up through Loki's skull, thick and gleaming white like the frozen bones pillaged from a ribcage. 

The table erupted in ice with the trail of Loki's fingers. Screams surged into a cacophony as the servants mobbed to escape the hall, tables overturned and food rolling onto the floor amidst the chaos. 

“Do you not enjoy what you see?” Loki hissed through clenched teeth.

His hand darted forwards, closing around Fandral's neck. He leaned into Fandral's frantic pulse. With a single thought ice encased Loki's hand. Fandral's heartbeat lulled, bending to Loki's cold. 

“Loki!” Thor shouted, grabbing his brother by the shoulder. “Stop this,” he whispered frantically. 

Loki tilted his head to the side and exaggerated a frown. “Of course, your highness.” He threw Thor into a wall with a jet-stream of ice. 

Sif's muscles bunched, ready to pounce. “I would wait on that, if I were you,” Loki smiled. A spear of ice materialized in his spare hand. 

“Loki,” Thor growled under his breath as he stood up. 

Loki slunk to his knees, face inches away from Fandral's frozen in horror. Another time, another place, he would have fought back like the warrior he was, but the ice was crystallizing in his throat. Fandral struggled to breath. He choked out chunks of frost. 

“Would hate to have that tongue of yours freeze and break off,” Loki muttered. He pulled his hand away and the ice began to evaporate, sizzling into smoke and winter magic. “Oh the things I can imagine it does. That it will do for me,” Loki promised.

“Just a little show, brother.” Loki clapped Thor on the back as he stood and approached him. “You were correct, it has been some time since you have seen me like this. Worth commemorating, don't you agree?” 

Loki slid his fingers across Thor's jawline. With a rush the illusion of pale Aesir flesh rippled up through the skin to skin contact to consume his fingertips and devour the rest of his Jötun form. His eyes bled away into green last. “Would hate for you to forget the monster you share a roof with.” 

No one moved to stop Loki as he left the hall. They remained immobile until the clicking of his stiletto heels died away with the magic of seidr. He tucked himself into an enclave hidden from sight by the curve of the great hall's doorway. 

“You cannot just allow him to act like that!” Sif turned on Thor when Loki feigned his departure.

“Sif, stop,” Thor said as he helped Fandral to his feet. 

“No! He only throws these temper tantrums because he knows you will prevent anyone from fighting back,” Sif shouted.

“He does not mean them. He is angry, hurt,” Thor said softly. Loki smiled to himself.

“By imagined slights - you told me that yourself once Thor! Have you been listening to him for so long that even you have fallen for his tricks?” Sif's eyebrows pressed in an angry line. 

“I see him clearly for who he is.” 

“A silver-tongued liar.” Fandral said. Thor shot him a glare. Fandral shrugged, “An adept liar. Talented. But a liar.”

“He is my brother. His past tries on him.”

“What past? Being raised in the palace as a prince when the fates would have left him in the frozen wastelands to die?” Sif argued. 

“When have you ever heard of a Jötun freezing to death?” Thor asked, haunted by the echo of Loki's voice. 

“The Allfather took him in as his own Thor. He was given the opportunity to be someone he could not have otherwise been,” Fandral said. 

“Because he was born a frost giant? He is still that frost giant, only here is he hated for it,” Thor muttered. 

“They make themselves monsters Thor, they aren't born them. Loki does this of his own volition. If anyone caused half the chaos Loki does they would be locked in the dungeons.” Sif stumbled over the sore subject. Century old wounds that refused to heal. Thor's eyebrows furrowed. “I am not asking you to put him there. But do not stop me from fighting back. From putting him in his place. Any of us could easily beat Loki in a fair fight, even an unfair one, and we should be allowed to do so, prince or not,” Sif said. 

“I will not allow you to hurt him.”

“And what of when he hurts someone? Kills someone?” Sif argued. 

“It will not come to that,” Thor said firmly.

“Do you really trust Loki to restrain himself to harmless mischief?” Sif's eyebrows narrowed, displeasure vagrant upon her face. 

“I will not allow it to go that far,” Thor promised. 

“Thor -” “No Sif.” He interrupted her. “I will manage this. He is my brother. I will manage him.” Thor repeated it like a mantra. 

Thor offered his friends a feeble smile and slipped from the great hall, walking right past Loki and into the corridors beyond. 

Loki's body melted away into the disguise of invisibility with a mutter. He moved to exit the hall, jerking still at the sound of a voice. “Do you think he can manage him?” Fandral said to Sif. 

Loki approached them on mute footfall, trailing around the pair as they righted tables and chairs. 

“No,” Sif said.

“Are you going to do something about it?” Fandral asked.

“Let the trickster scheme, not me. I will be merely be ready for his next one,” Sif growled. Loki held back a laugh. He resisted the urge to taunt her, only because he could barely hear Thor's footsteps down the hall. Loki bolted after him. 

Loki trailed after Thor invisibly, falling into the rhythm of his brother's footsteps with ease. The stench of ozone followed them. A light rain fell on the palace outside as they climbed the steps to Loki's chambers. 

Thor knocked on Loki's bed chamber door. “Loki?” He called out. 

Thor gave up much quicker than Loki had. After knocking once more he retreated to the sparring rings.

Thor took his pent up energy out on his fellow warriors until no more offered to enter the ring against him. The last exited with a concussion, carried on a stretcher to the healing wards. Thor apologized profusely, pouring out the words he barely heard himself say. Memorized condolences. Empty sounds when he was burdened by distraction. Loki watched invisibly from the stands, memorizing every gesture. Every emotion that briefly surfaced upon Thor's usually expressive face. Cherishing his worry and his pain like it was a love poem Thor wrote for him expressly.

The rain increased, pelting Thor profusely as he moved on to the training dummies. Loki rolled his eyes and moved to an overhang closer to the palace. From the distance he could only make out Thor's silhouette, shifting and arching like shadows in the light. 

Thor beat the cloth dummies with his fists long after the ring went black with the storm. Mjölnir was abandoned in the corner of the ring. Loki eyed her jealously. Thor hit the training dummy in the same spot, again and again, not holding back when the stuffing began to dent. The skin on Thor's knuckles peeled back. The stinging sensation urged him on, hitting harder than before. Throwing his shoulders and elbows into every hit. He slammed relentlessly into the dummy. 

A suspicious bolt of lightning struck the training dummy, setting it on fire. Thor kicked it with a snarl, knocking the cloth torso off its plank and into the sand. 

Thor fell to his knees in front of the training dummy. His eyes stared blindly at the ground. The rain continued to fall around him. The only discernible movement he made was the heaving of his shoulders, falling up and down with his panting. He sunk deeper into the sand. 

Loki walked towards Thor, but kept his distance. There lay the danger of an invisible space between the rain being seen: the outline of a person. 

Fandral materialized behind Thor. “Thor, you're going to get sick, come inside!” The clone shouted against the storm. 

Thor looked up at his friend, forcing a wilted smile. “Fandral,” He said. Thor got up slowly.

“Some new training technique?” Fandral teased as they left the ring together, Loki trailing behind invisibly. The slightest strain flickered across his mind, his brain agitated from upholding both spells at once. 

“A warrior must be able to fight under any condition,” Thor said in his usual booming voice. A mask for the emotions Loki had seen etched out in the weather. Even in their waking hours Thor had less and less control over himself. 

“Even when he worries about his brother,” the clone said. 

“I do not worry, everything is fine.” 

The clone arched an eyebrow. Thor stopped. Loki barely avoided walking into him. 

Thor scanned Fandral's face. He clapped his hand on his friend's shoulder experimentally. The rain had prompted Loki to make the clone solid, not wanting it to fall right through him and arouse worthy suspicion. Thor's hand fell on solid magic. “Are you sure?” The fake Fandral asked. “Perhaps you should go to the bathing pools, you would not do to catch a fever.” 

“I am fine, but I appreciate your concern my friend.” Thor smiled. It did not quite reach his eyes. Loki scowled.

The clone leaned closer to peer inquisitively at Thor's face. “I do not know Thor. Your face looks... thinner. Leaner. More... well pardon me for saying this, but effeminate.” He winked. Loki could not resist, ever hungry to turn the blade in deeper when originally he had only wanted to get Thor out of the rain and cold. The best of intentions withered quickly with poor care. Or perhaps they had always ever been an illusion, one even he fell for now. 

“Hrm.” Thor's lips pursed in a straight line. “Perhaps I will take your advice.” Thor said a little stiffer than before. 

“I hope you do. Farewell Thor,” Fandral said with a smile and a wave. The clone marched off in the opposite direction. He disappeared into green seidr upon turning the corner. 

Thor remained standing, staring at the corridor Fandral had gone down. His blue eyes shifted, staring off into space. Staring off into the space where Loki invisibly stood. He shook his head with a frown. 

Loki accompanied Thor to the bathing pools, only escaping to his own designs after he was satisfied that Thor spent at least a minute staring at himself pensively in the mirror. He trailed Thor on and off for the rest of the day. Not a moment passed when Loki did not know where his brother was. What expression his worried mind last faked. 

It was not until later that evening that Loki finally removed the spell of invisibility, and only when he was alone and in his own chambers after watching Thor drift off to sleep. The seidr faded away as Loki curled under the covers with a smug smile. He hugged the pillow to his chest, rising and falling in content abandon. He was asleep within minutes.

\-----

When next Loki opened his eyes he was trapped under the bedsheets. The handcuffs and the chain binding them to his collar snagged in the comforter. Loki struggled violently, kicking off the covers with a hiss. 

“Loki?” Thor's alarmed voice was muffled by the comforter. Thor pulled it off in one motion. Loki reached out to hit him, frozen by the sight of his hands. Blue. 

“Norns,” Loki hissed under his breath. 

His eyes flicked up to regard Thor cautiously, uncertain if it was an unconscious Thor or just a Thor from Loki's own imagination. Did his own mind now play out this horrible dream or was he bound to Thor's nightmare? 

“Take these off now,” Loki snarled, shoving his bound hands in Thor's face. “Your joke is over. Remove them.” 

“Loki, I cannot...” Thor's eyebrows tensed. 

“I see,” Loki said, turning his back to Thor. He slipped out of the bed without much difficulty. When he was standing he realized he was naked. Loki grabbed the sheets and threw them around him like a cloak. 

“Get me clothes,” Loki demanded. 

“Yours are on the -”

“Actual clothes. I am tired of your little fantasies Thor,” Loki snapped. His anger flared out in every word, stretching the boundaries of his patience. Loki had not expected to be stuck in this dream again. His brother's warprize, except Thor was not his brother here. 

“Now,” Loki hissed. 

“Get them yourself,” Thor muttered. 

Loki's eyes narrowed to bloody red slits, watching Thor as he walked to the bathroom. 

When the door closed Loki unceremoniously dropped the bedsheets with a scowl. He rummaged through Thor's cupboards, leaving them open and messy. Discarding shirts on the floor with a flourish of his bound hands. Every gesture fuelled by the indignation and surprise of Thor's lack of hospitality. His lack of kindness. 

By the time Thor returned Loki was dressed. Not impeccably, but at least there was a shirt this time. His eyes were still a threat, tracking every one of Thor's movements as if he was on the verge of lunging forward and pinning him to the wall with a blade. 

“I will have food sent up to you shortly,” Thor said curtly. 

“I will go get it myself.”

“You cannot wander around the palace unaccompanied.” 

“Oh?” Loki walked towards Thor. “Is that for my sake, or for the precious Aesir?”

“Both.” Thor said without flinching as Loki invaded his personal space. He stared down at him passively even as Loki bared his teeth in a mute snarl. 

“Well then accompany me,” Loki said, slipping past Thor. He turned the doorknob and left the room. 

Thor followed down the corridor. “Loki, stop,” Thor said.

Loki kept walking. 

“Loki,” Thor's voice came out in a low warning growl. Loki ignored him. 

Thor caught up to Loki and shoved him against the wall roughly. “You will do as I say.” Thor's eyebrows narrowed. 

“Why is that?”

“I am king.”

“Even in your wildest fantasies, I do not bow down to you,” Loki purred with a feral smile. 

Thor frowned, but said nothing. His breath steamed on Loki's face. Loki almost choked against the heat in his Jötun form. 

“Stop this,” Thor's voice was barely above a whisper. 

“Pleading? You will have to be on your knees for me to even consider it,” Loki said. 

Thor's pupils dilated and his breathing quickened. Loki smiled dangerously. “Oh, do you remember... what was that, last night?” His bloody eyes traced out Thor's raised veins. The ridges of tension splayed across his face like the lines of a spell to summon a berserker god. A shudder of pleasure ran through Loki's body. 

“Yes, but that will not happen again,” Thor's breathing sped up.

“You are right, it will not,” Loki smirked. This time there would be no games of consent. This time Loki burned for the monster. He would desecrate Thor by making his brother desecrate him.

“Now get off me,” Loki's teeth bared as he widened the smile. 

Loki shoved forward. Thor released him, as if on instinct. Loki could feel the electricity snaking invisibly through the air. Sparkling across his face with the friction of every movement. 

“Loki,” Thor growled again. 

“Stop with your empty threats. What are you going to do to me? Will you hurt me Thor?” Loki laughed. He trailed a bound hand across Thor's face, jerking it in Thor's hair as he grabbed a handful of it. “You are the last person you will allow to hurt me, aren't you?” 

“Why do you think that?” Thor's breath was uneven, voice a growl. 

Loki paused to observe Thor with a thoughtful smile, reserved for all the reverence of a faithful servant summoning their demon lord from hel. “I know monsters.”

He released Thor's hair with a shove. Thor dug his hands into angry fists. 

“Come, your highness,” Loki laughed. “I enjoy your palace. I will see the rest of it.”

He walked down the hall, Thor on his heel. Stalked by a storm cloud trying not to explode. Loki would not have it any other way.


	6. VI

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter was supposed to have porn, oops. sometime soon hopefully? couldn't resist disappointment!

Loki headed for the great hall and threw open the doors. The muffled chatter shrivelled into silence, servant and royal eyes alike gaping at Loki in alarm. His red eyes were hooded with pleasure. “Oh yes, I quite like this,” Loki said aloud. 

Loki stalked towards the front of the hall where the honoured warriors and palace advisers sat. Thor grabbed the chain that bound Loki's neck to his hands. Loki kept walking, forcing Thor into a light jog to keep up with his long strides. 

Loki flopped into an unoccupied chair at the front table. His lips split into a grin to cover the wince of pain as his shattered ribs jostled. 

Loki kicked his feet up on the table. “Perhaps you should have someone fetch me food after all,” he smiled up at Thor. “I find myself not at all interested in moving,” he said, loud enough for the entire table to overhear. Sif and the warriors three rose to surround Loki. 

“What is he doing here, your majesty?” Hogun asked with a slight bow of his head. 

“Why is he not in the dungeons with the other slaves and prisoners of war?” Sif said. 

Pain shot through Thor's sky-blue eyes. Centuries old wounds threatened to burst open, as raw as the day they were made. Thor cleared his throat. “I have use of him and he cannot be any help to me when he is in there.” His voice was guarded.

Loki shifted his face into empty indifference, rubbing his heels against the table cloth. Who put me there? The screams haunted them both. Loki watched Thor suffer in isolation. 

“What use do you have of me?” Loki asked. Fandral shifted nervously. Sif bristled beside him. They all stared down at him with narrowed eyes, the usual veil of tolerance ripped away in the unconscious world. The blue of his unfamiliar Jötun skin seared away all measures of kindness, except for Thor's. 

“As I have said, Loki is the only one that can pull me from the rage,” Thor said stiffly to everyone. 

“Well anyone could do it, but no one else is quite so eager to knock you unconscious your highness,” Loki purred. 

“I would not be so ungrateful when someone has found a use for you, giant,” Volstagg threatened. 

“Giant is rather generous,” Fandral laughed.

“Because if I have no use to the Aesir, I have no use at all?” Loki's eyes narrowed.

“Enough!” Thor raised his voice. “Loki is here to help me control my rage and that is final.”

“I would advise against telling that to the entire realm,” Loki said. 

Thor sat down beside him. “That will be all,” he dismissed his friends. Hogun gave Loki a parting dirty look. 

After they left Thor stared pointedly at Loki, searching his face. “Why would you advise that?”

“For the very reason you asked me in private.”

“Humour me.”

Loki rolled his eyes. “Do I ever not?” Thor's face remained empty. “Very well. It would not be intelligent to tell the entire realm that you require anything of your warprize. They will think you weak. They may wonder if you can even control me. If I am that powerful and intelligent, should I be allowed to live among them?” His cheeks flushed. “Is it safe to keep me alive at all?” Loki whispered with hooded pleasure. 

“You are wise.”

“Was it ever in doubt?” Loki preened.

“How would you suggest I explain your presence instead?”

“Unchain me.”

“I cannot do that...” Thor frowned. 

“Don't trust me?” 

“Once... but not anymore. Now I trust myself.” To keep you in line, Loki finished the sentence in his mind. 

“Look how well that fares for you. You need me. You always have,” Loki looked away. His bloody red eyes would spoil the sentiment he attempted to abuse. 

“I just met you, Loki,” Thor's voice was soft. 

Loki played along. “You have always needed someone like me.” 

“And what is that?”

Loki traced a bound hand across Thor's stiff jaw. “A kindred monster.” This time Loki looked him right in the eye. Thor pulled away with a jerk. Loki laughed frostily. 

“Unchain me. Tell your realm I am here to create a peace between the Aesir and the Jötun.”

“The realm does not want peace. They want the frost giants dead.”

“Now that most of the Jötun are dead, they will want peace. A stomach full of blood is at last ready to listen.”

“Do you want this peace? On behalf of your people?” 

“I want my freedom.” Loki clinked his chains on the table. 

“And what will you do when you get it?” Thor asked. 

“Unchain me and find out.”

Thor stared at him in silence, eyes searching again. Grasping for the shred of humanity he wanted to find. “No,” he said firmly. 

“Hrm.” Loki hummed. “I do think I would like breakfast. You have distracted me for long enough.” Loki kicked his feet off the table and stood. He hid his smile upon noticing a light drizzle patter against the windows of the hall. 

Loki wasted his day exploring the palace he had grown up in, feigning ignorance and novelty with every room. In the beginning Thor pretended to be eager to give him a tour, but his forced smiles were eaten up by silence after Loki 'accidentally' knocked over a few bookshelves in the palace library and nearly scared a patient to death in the healing ward. 

Loki challenged himself to devise new ways to get under Thor's skin, each more inventive than the last. “I didn't realize I was this clumsy,” Loki chided himself sarcastically after dropping the torch he took from one of the corridors into a pile of hay in the stables. The stable boy managed to douse the flames by upending buckets from three of the horse's stalls, but one of the horses escaped. He chased after it as he shouted a string of apologies back at Thor. 

“So... bathing hall next?” Loki grinned innocently. 

“No,” Thor said stiffly.

“I must have heard you incorrectly. Did you say no?” Loki's grin widened. 

“Aye, I did. I have had enough of your mischief Loki.” Thor grabbed the makeshift leash between Loki's collar and handcuffs and tugged it.

Loki pulled in the opposite direction. Thor arched an eyebrow and proceeded to yank Loki in the direction of the palace. 

“Ah, ah, ah. I am not interested in going in there,” Loki hummed. He dropped to the ground to avoid being pulled.

“Loki,” Thor growled. 

“I am not going back to your chambers. Or wherever you are going to put me. It is all the same, locking me away.” Loki crossed his legs and folded his hands in his lap. 

“This is not up for discussion.” 

Thor walked over to Loki and tried to yank him to stand by his shoulders. Loki fell to his stomach and went limp, imitating a rag doll. 

“You look ridiculous bro-.... Norns, Loki stop this,” Thor snarled. 

A small crowd had drawn around them. “Nothing to see here!” Thor called out loudly, attempting to shoo them away.

“I agree. I would look much improved without my handcuffs.” Loki's voice was muffled by his face pressing into the grass.

Thor grabbed Loki's shoulders and yanked him to sit up. Loki dropped back down, this time on his back. “Ah your majesty, I am not interested in having sex with you!” Loki shouted, kicking at Thor more for show than actually trying to land a hit. 

“He is just joking,” Thor halfheartedly attempted to assure the growing crowd. They were all staring in wide-eyed uncertainty. 

Loki landed a kick in Thor's stomach, knocking him backwards and onto his ass. 

“Hrm,” Loki said to himself upon raising an eyebrow. He jumped up and ran in the opposite direction of the palace. Thor cursed viciously under his breath. 

The crowd around Thor hesitated, eyes darting back and forth between their king and the escaping slave. 

Loki stumbled, clutching his searing ribs. At the sight of his injury two members of the crowd took off after him. 

Loki heard them pounding along behind him, quickly catching up because the chains slowed him down. “The first person to catch me will be skinned as their reward!” Loki shouted back over his shoulder. He grinned wickedly when the sound of footfall vanished after that. 

Loki could see the outskirts of Frigga's garden at the edge of his vision. A bolt of thunder struck down in his path. Loki paused to turn direction. Expecting him to still be running, Thor launched into Loki with full force from behind and threw him into the ground. They landed with a thud and a painful hiss from Loki when Thor's weight flattened his raw ribs. 

“See, he's trying to-” Loki's shouts cut short when he glanced up and noticed they were alone. “You oaf,” Loki snarled, teeth clenched.

“Should not have run,” Thor said flatly. 

Thor wound Loki's leash around his right hand and sat up. He slipped an arm around Loki's waist and stood with him in his arms. “If you kick me again, you will regret it.” 

Loki's heart rate increased to match the winds picking up around them. The lightning streaking across the sky brought on a tight knot of anticipation in his stomach. 

Thor carried Loki to his chambers and dropped him unceremoniously on the bed. Loki shifted away from Thor, resting his back against the headboard. 

Loki knocked his back into the headboard for emphasis as Thor approached him. Thor attached another chain to Loki's hands and locked it to the headboard, pocketing the key. 

“And what are you going to do now?” Loki feigned a tremble to his voice. 

“Suddenly afraid?” Thor scoffed. 

“Perhaps everything else was just a disguise. Perhaps I was always afraid of you, giant killer,” Loki said softly. 

Thor sat down on the bed. Loki pulled back his feet and brought his knees into his chest, eyeing Thor warily over them. 

“Do you know the stories they tell about the thunder god back in Jötunheim? Wild and manic with his thirst for Jötun blood. I grew up on stories of you, the thing I feared in the shadows and dark under my bed,” Loki whispered.

“I do not know what you are doing Loki, but you will not get very far with it,” Thor said stiffly. 

“Not far. Clever,” Loki's voice cracked as he tugged on his chains. 

“Stop this game,” Thor sighed huskily. The long lines of tension were clear on his face. Exhaustion earned from a day chasing Loki around in circles.

“It is not a game.”

“It always is with you.”

“You do not know me. Not the things I have seen.” Loki's voice broke again. 

Thor crawled towards Loki on the bed, pressing their faces together. Loki flinched away, but Thor grabbed him around the neck and shoved them nose to nose. “Stop.”

“I'm not doing anything,” Loki whispered with wide eyes. 

Lightning illuminated the room with a crack. Loki shivered with pleasure, disguising it as fright. “Don't do this,” Loki whispered. 

Thor pulled back. “I am not doing anything.” 

“You're going to hurt me.”

“Norns, Loki. I'm not doing anything.” Thor narrowed his eyes. 

“I can feel you, in the room, crawling into my skin.” Loki shuddered and shut his eyes. “They say you like killing Jötuns that way best, impaling them with your thunder.” 

“You are ridiculous,” Thor shook his head and slid off the bed. He retreated to his bathroom and closed the door with a snap.

Loki watched the closed door reverently, fantasizing about what should happen when Thor finally came back. The precipice of destruction in sight. He had planted the seeds of violence in Thor's head. Now they just needed a little prodding. 

Thor returned some time later. Loki lost track of time without a clock and the curtains drawn to cover the broken windows. His back ached from leaning against the bed.

“Let me sleep in the dungeon,” Loki said. Thor jerked still like he had been hit. 

“Why?”

Loki made a show of biting his bottom lip and looking Thor over. “Never mind,” he said quickly and pulled the covers over his knees. 

“Tell me,” Thor demanded. Loki winced. 

“I do not want you to hurt me,” Loki lied. 

“This again,” Thor growled. Loki hugged his knees. Thor sighed in frustration. “I will not. I will sleep on the couch again if it pleases you.”

“It would please me if you unchained me, so I could defend myself.”

Thor walked towards his bedside table and opened the drawer. He pulled out one of Loki's daggers and placed it on the bed, inches from Loki's feet. “There, you can defend yourself from me, should you need to.”

Loki eyed it with a frown. “That is hardly a protection from thunder and lightning. From the god of storms. From-” 

“Best you will get,” Thor interrupted.

“I would have better should my seidr be restored to me.”

“Best you will get,” Thor repeated firmly. 

Loki picked up the dagger and ran it across his palm. He did so slowly again when he noticed Thor watching him hesitantly. 

Thor kept the bed between them. The thunder and lightning had died down outside, the winds stopped completely. Loki could barely hear the trickle of rain. An entire day of fucking with Thor, wasted. A simple warm bath had likely leveled his mood. 

“Well,” Loki said, balancing the blade on his palm. “it is certainly not protection enough,” Loki said with a frown as he brought up the blade and stabbed himself in the neck. 

Thor leaped forward, clearing the distance to land on the bed. He ripped the dagger out of Loki's neck and threw it to the floor. “You idiot,” Thor hissed as he grabbed the bed sheets and scrunched them up to apply pressure to the wound.

“Why would you do that?” Thor's voice was frantic as the sheets soaked red. 

“You were going to hurt me later anyways. Should... should have done it when I was alone. I am an idiot,” Loki allowed his voice to stammer. The wound stung, but not as much as Thor pressing on his rib cage. He inhaled sharply and coughed. 

“Loki, Loki, I will never hurt you.” Thor promised desperately as he grabbed Loki's face in a vice grip with his left hand as he frantically applied pressure with the right. “Those stories you heard... they aren't true. They aren't me.”

“I know how many Jötun you have killed... how many Aesir even. Your own people. What... what's to stop you from killing me?” Loki struggled under Thor's vice grip, panting from the blood loss. 

“You will.”

“I can't stop anything,” Loki forced out a whine. 

“You will stop me, because I won't hurt you. I can't. Loki I will never hurt you. Just because it is you. That is enough,” Thor said quickly.

“You sentimental fool,” Loki muttered in genuine agitation.


	7. VII

“I won't hurt you, I won't hurt you,” Thor muttered to himself as he cradled Loki in his arms. His right hand frantically stroked Loki's hair, the left clutching the bloody bedsheets to the self inflicted wound in Loki's neck. “D-don't leave me,” Thor stammered. 

Loki stilled in his grasp, face blank and unreadable. 

“Not again,” Thor whispered, hiding his face into Loki's chest. The thunder god's shoulders shook. A mild wind picked up outside the room. 

Loki's eyes flickered over Thor in the darkness of the room, taking in every broken gesture so often denied to him in their waking hours. He searched for signs of weakness, the fissures that would lead Loki to his exposed heart.

“Just stay here. I have always wanted you to stay,” Thor panted amidst ugly sobs. Loki made no attempt to correct his brother, to refer to the logic of the dreams wherein they were supposed to be strangers. Loki his warprize, not brother. These stolen moments of truth, where Thor revealed his desires because he thought they were not real, burned Loki with pleasure and hunger simultaneously. Every morsel made him only desire more, insatiable and raw with need. 

“Tell me, tell me exactly how you want me to stay,” Loki whispered back, gasping into Thor's hair. 

Thor lifted his head slowly, blue eyes wide and staring at Loki in shock. 

Loki cursed himself internally for giving up the facade of fear so quickly. Had that been the right lie to go with? Loki fought to keep his face empty and open, ready to react to whatever Thor would give him to work with. Whatever he could take. “My highness?” Loki prompted softly, eyebrows arching eagerly.

Thor blinked at the word. “No... not here. Not like this,” Thor whispered urgently. Pleading, but he seemed to know this was all they had. “Just Thor,” he said, breathy. His hand found the back of Loki's neck in an iron grip, but when he brought his lips up to Loki's the kiss was punishingly soft. 

Thor pressed his lips to Loki's in a chaste kiss, pushing insistently harder with every passing second. Loki opened his mouth to deepen the kiss and pulled back his lips to use teeth, but stopped at the gentle touch of Thor's tongue stroking his own. Gently, languidly, stroking him from the inside. 

Loki's body shivered with displeasure, the softness of every touch uncomfortable against his skin. He fought not to buck as Thor leaned into him with enough force to guide him back to the bed, but only pressing gently and never forcing. Thor loosened his grip on the back of Loki's neck until his hand remained as a heavy weight, warm and suffocating. 

“Just be Loki, let me love you,” Thor whispered between tender kisses. 

It was Loki's turn to widen his eyes now, but Thor couldn't see them. Couldn't prepare, completely distracted by the softness of Loki's lips, for the dagger Loki sunk in one solid motion into Thor's back.

Thor roared and reared up from the bed. 

Lightning cracked through the room in a blinding white spasm. 

Thor wrenched the dagger out of his back, throwing it to the side of the room where it fell with a clatter. “WHAT?” Thor snarled, face ugly with rage. “What, what, why would you do that?” A completely different kind of stammering then, every word a threat. 

Loki struggled to breath over the stink of ozone filling up his nostrils. The scent of Thor filling him up from the inside. A lazy smile spilled across his paling face. “If you want my love, you will pay for it, and I do not come cheap,” Loki purred. 

“You lied before, I knew you were not afraid,” Thor grit his teeth as he spoke, veins tensing in his neck. 

“Come closer Thor, let me show you how afraid I am,” Loki said with an arched eyebrow.

“You are bound and chained, you cannot hurt me.”

“Come then.” Loki beckoned him with the tilt of his jaw. 

“You are still bleeding,” Thor said slowly, the anger not gone from his face. The wind speed continued to increase outside the room. 

“Oh, and you like that?” Loki laughed. The pain from the wound had long left him, woozy now with the blood loss that brought him high with pleasure. If only it had been Thor that had stabbed him. If only. They still had time to play. 

“You need to go to the healing ward,” Thor said with a frown. 

“You do not want to take me there right now, do you?”

Thor worried his bottom lip, eyes still hard and narrowed. “No.”

“Come then, see if you can fuck me, before I kill you,” Loki said with an encouraging smile. 

Thor cleared his throat, the anger stinging the both of them in the form of electricity. He stared at Loki for a long moment before shaking his head to himself. Thor slid off the bed. 

Loki's eyes narrowed as he watched him go. “Hrm, where is my berserker god?” Loki said.

Thor walked to the door. 

“Think you have a conscience, Thor?” Loki goaded him. 

Thor paused at the door frame, knuckles white as he gripped it. 

“You are lying. Lying to yourself. You know what you really want to do to me,” Loki purred, stretching out the syllables. 

“I am calling a healer for you,” Thor said stiffly. The anger reigned in for his words lashed out in the form of static energy, sizzling around the ceiling. 

“What a waste, we will just have to start again from scratch next time.”

“There will be no next time,” Thor said, firmer this time. 

“No what?” Loki urged him.

“I am never going to have sex with you while you try to kill me, or yourself,” Thor said. He walked out of the room and disappeared down the hall.

“Never say never!” Loki called out after him. 

After Thor left, Loki squirmed in the blood soaked sheets, kicking at them in frustration. He couldn't leverage himself enough to sit up while still being chained to the bed. Eventually he fell back with a pained sigh, waiting. Biding his time. 

When the healers arrived Loki allowed them to replace the sheets without fuss. He moved to the side so the short one could place a new one on the bed, then rolled back over so she could tuck it into the mattress on the other side. 

“Going to have to change the mattress,” one healer muttered to the other. 

The second healer glanced up at Loki watching them, red eyes tracking their every moment. “Not right now,” the healer said under her breath. 

The first healer retreated to the corner of he room to mix a vile smelling salve. The second healer approached Loki and dabbed at the open wound on his neck. “You have five seconds to get away from me,” Loki purred under his breath. 

The healer went very still. 

“You see, I actually would kill you, but I think Thor likes the illusion more than the real game.” Loki snorted. “So tomorrow, tell your king thank you, but tonight, right now, scream, and run like hel were about to swallow you,” Loki smiled wide and arched his eyebrows. 

The healer screamed, shrill like a banshee. She grabbed the other healer and bolted for the door. The mix of salve fell to the floor and shattered in their escape.

Loki fell back on his palms, waiting for Thor. Except it wasn't Thor who tore into the room. 

“Jötun!” Fandral snarled in battle cry as he burst through the door, followed by Hogun and a few warriors behind him Loki did not recognize. Each man had his weapon raised and ready. 

Fandral strode over to him, flourishing his sword. “It seems you have been giving the healers a little trouble,” 

“Oh go away,” Loki hissed through clenched teeth. 

“Soon enough.” Fandral smiled. “But see, here in Asgard it is poor manners to scare the maidens.”

“And do I just not scare you because I am chained up? But that did not help you keep your wits about you before,” Loki snarled, frustrated that none of them seemed like they would be leaving anytime soon. The others covered up the doorway. Loki's eyes darted between the men, trying to decide which was the most disposable. How many bodies could he leave tonight and still have a chance of getting Thor in the mood? 

Loki tore his eyes back to Fandral, who had produced a muzzle from behind his back. He placed his sword on the bed. A stranger behind him followed suit, dropping his weapon to hold out a white jacket with buckles and extremely long sleeves. 

Fandral grabbed Loki by the chin, using his fingers to keep Loki's jaw clamped shut. The other man grabbed Loki's hair to hold his head straight, palm digging into the back of his neck. Loki sighed into the pressure, hooded eyes fluttering. 

Loki jerked upright at the cold pressure of the muzzle on his lips. Fandral snapped it closed, locking it at the nape of Loki's neck. 

“Do not move,” Fandral warned him. 

The warrior handed Fandral the jacket and pulled a set of keys out of his pocket. They couldn't put Loki into the straightjacket without releasing the handcuffs in the front and moving his hands behind him. Loki smiled to himself under the muzzle. 

At the click of the key Loki jerked his hands forward, handcuffs falling off now that they were no longer locked. 

A blade of ice appeared halfway through the warrior's stomach, coming out the other side slick and engulfed in blood. The man fell forwards onto the bed, impaled. 

Someone was on Loki before he could turn around for Fandral. An unfamiliar knee bent into his stomach, pressing into his raw ribs. Loki gasped against the muzzle, cold metal pressing into his lips and muffling the sound. 

Loki called ice, winter, and Jötunheim to his fingers. With a single thought another blade of ice engulfed his hand, easier than it would have in the real world. Where before he would have called green magic like a second nature, the ice flowed past his fingertips like an extension of his veins. Had Thor's fantasy that Loki had grown up as the prince of Jötunheim added to his control over the ice? Loki only had to reach and the ice filled in the gaps, ripping and biting through flesh and muscle as if it were alive. Loki sunk a blade of ice into someone's neck. Someone else's thigh. 

It was over soon enough. Still chained to the bed by his neck, and seven to one, Loki did not stand a chance. Only fear of Thor's retribution had kept the warriors from seeking a killing blow. Someone hit Loki across the head with the blunt end of an axe and then he was sliding away into darkness. 

Loki awoke slowly, eyes fluttering hazily. His senses were still dulled from sleep as he yawned and found himself incapable. The muzzle prevented him from opening his mouth. 

Loki shifted, hands stuck behind his back. Someone had put the straight jacket on when he had been unconscious. Unconscious, but he could not recall waking up in the real world. A jolt of fear coursed through him, but Loki quickly stuffed it away. 

“Good morning,” Thor said with a guarded voice.

Loki turned his head to regard him, sprawled out on the couch. Loki glanced around the room. Still Thor's room. He was still chained to his bed. 

“Hnf,” Loki muttered past the muzzle. 

“Cat got your tongue?” Thor teased darkly, the words not matching his stormy eyes. 

Loki narrowed his eyes. 

“I should have done this earlier. You seem much more obliging. It would have saved lives,” Thor said with a burdened frown.

Loki fought the urge to laugh, not that he could have anyways. 

“You killed people. Warriors. Citizens of Asgard. Do you even care?” Thor said as he stood up from the chair. His anger followed him around the room, sparkling and wild in the air. Loki smiled against the muzzle. 

Thor walked up to the bed, stopping in front of it, searching the part of Loki's face that he could see. Like the night before, he seemed to find nothing he could use. “I do not know if being raised on Jötunheim made you this way, or if you always were,” Thor admitted. There were no lies between them now, no need to be. That was the greatest lie of all. Loki watched him hungrily. 

“I know you, in another life,” Thor said softly. The anger drained from his voice but did not quite leave the room. It was always there, coursing. Waiting to consume. 

Loki struggled against the straightjacket, shifting his shoulders furiously. That was about the extent of putting up a fight that he could manage. 

Thor undid the latch at the end of the muzzle and eased it off. 

Loki spit when it was removed, licking his dry lower lip. “What am I like, in this other life you think exists?” He asked, voice hoarse. 

“Gentle,” Thor said. 

Loki laughed darkly. “I could never be such a thing. Not in any world, not in any life.”

“Gentle but dangerous. Always dangerous. You might kill someone, but you would do it gently,” Thor said. 

Loki searched his face. The pair of them were always looking, hoping to find the next weakness first when the other tripped up. “And you, how do you kill someone?” Loki asked. 

Thor frowned, moving forward to put the muzzle back on Loki. It had obviously been a mistake to remove it.

Loki jerked his head back. “What, do not want to hear it your highness? Even when I am not talking, you still know what I would say,” Loki hissed. 

Thor stilled his hands.

“You said might kill someone. We both know I have. You have as well,” Loki went on. 

“I do not have to listen to your raving,” Thor narrowed his eyes. 

“But you are here. Even bound up, completely, no one else would guard your little pet would they? Too dangerous, am I?” Loki said. He watched Thor's face as the words hit home. “But that is exactly how you like your pets.”

“You are not a pet,” Thor sighed with exasperation. The muzzle fell to the bed with a clink, as if he could pretend otherwise when he was no longer holding it. Thor sat down on the edge. 

“And yet you keep me chained like one.”

“Because if I released you, I would not trust what you would do.”

“And look what you are doing to me,” Loki hissed. He worked his face into false agitation and pain. 

“I cannot help it. You are not a monster, but you act monstrous. You do these things because you are...” Thor paused, searching for the word. “Angry. You feel slighted.” He stared hard at Loki. “You feel unloved.” Thor's eyes widened just a little as he spoke. 

“You do not know me, I am a stranger,” Loki reminded him of the dream with a snarl. Urging to make things as unreal as possible so they might be real. 

“You may not have memories of me Loki, but you feel unloved now because I know you feel that way in real life,” Thor said slowly. 

“Did someone hit you on the head when I was unconscious? If so, that is my job,” Loki kept up the game.

“You are here... like this... fighting me because I know I need to do this. And yet I have not,” Thor murmured to himself. 

“Do what?”

Thor did not answer him with words. He slipped off Loki's pants in one solid movement and answered him in the tender kisses he applied to his brother's cerulean blue legs. Thor worked his way up from Loki's ankles to his thighs.

Thor held Loki down by his hipbones, pinning them into the bed with his right arm. He used his left to hold steady Loki's left leg, keeping it from kicking out at him. Thor planted kisses along Loki's cock, just barely hard. Thor's eyes widened slightly at the sight of Loki's vagina, but he did not pause for long, moving on to kiss there too. 

Thor kissed Loki's vagina gently, probing at the unfamiliar skin with his tongue. He licked a stripe inside, feeling Loki tense under his grasp. 

“Why so quiet?” Thor asked with a faint laugh. 

“I am waiting for the right moment to try and kill you,” Loki said, his usual purr a little hitched and uneven. 

Thor looked up at him, their blue and red eyes meeting in silent understanding.


	8. VIII

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Valentines day! Have some porn :D
> 
> At long last, for [lokis-gspot](http://lokis-gspot.tumblr.com), Loki finally gets the attention we've been waiting for! I seem to have developed a terrible habit of turning gifts for other people into... well, gifts for myself. Hope everyone still likes it all the same <3

“Well, do wait a little, so I may have the chance to show you what it means to be loved before you try and kill me,” Thor said. His steely eyes bore into Loki's, demanding acquiescence. Thor ran his fingers in soft circles over Loki's cerulean thigh as he waited, forcing himself to not appear affected by his brother's true form. 

Loki saw through the facade, but he mistook Thor's wonder for disgust. “What do you know about love?” Loki hissed softly, abandoned of real threat in favour of wrongly assuming Thor would suffer through their tryst.

Thor kneaded the top of Loki's thigh, rubbing his firm hands into the muscles. 

When he felt his brother relax just a little Thor returned his left hand to fist around the base of Loki's cock, pumping it lazily. 

“Much, you have been an excellent teacher,” Thor said while he worked his hand. 

Thor's other hand moved to stroke the lips of Loki's vagina, fingers wandering the edge. “You have tested me so often, and though I do not relish how you pull away and fight me, I have come to know what unconditional means through your direction,” Thor said firmly, defiantly even. 

“All lies to ease your conscience on what you are about to do,” Loki protested, eager to uphold the untruth of the dream for a little longer, pleased with where it had gotten him thus far. “We are strangers to one another.” 

Thor increased the pressure on Loki's cock while maintaining the rhythm of his strokes, steady and even. Like the last time Thor had begun these ministrations, his tender touch was suffocating. Smothering. Unpleasant in all the wrong ways. Loki held back a hiss as his body relented to Thor's touch, cock hardening. His mind refused, uninhibited by the false pleasure. Pleasure for another, but torture for him. 

“No matter what, we could never be strangers Loki,” Thor told him earnestly. 

Loki ached for a rougher touch, a forceful hand. As it was now every touch screamed agony, a delicate softness that overwhelmed him with revilement. Sickeningly sweet so it became only sick. Loki bucked his hips uselessly, trapped between his own conviction not to beg for the treatment he preferred and to keep going. He had already brought Thor this far. 

Thor mistook Loki's rolling hips for eagerness. Thor slipped his index finger into his mouth, hollowing his cheeks as he coated it in saliva. He brought it out slowly, releasing the fingertip with a lewd pop. 

“I will take care of you,” Thor promised. 

Impossible, Loki burned to hiss, but the thought was quickly replaced by a sharp discomfort as Thor slipped his finger inside Loki's cunt. 

Loki's eyebrows raised, adjusting to the sudden discomfort that didn't quite match the sort of pain he preferred. Even if it had, Thor was already bringing his head down to Loki's cock and completely distracting Loki from all sensations of having his brother inside of him. 

Thor licked a quick stripe along the underside of Loki's cock. He hovered by the bottom, breath curling hot and heavy against Loki's skin. 

Thor shifted, bringing his tongue up and down the length, applying the faintest of pressure with each liquid kiss. Thor's tongue lingered longest on the head of Loki's cock, trailing along the slit, escaping only back into his mouth when Thor finally took Loki's entire cock in. 

Thor experimentally dragged his mouth up and down Loki's cock, shifting his weight and crawling closer. Loki watched with a blank expression as his own body obscenely disappeared between the berserker king's lips.

Thor slipped a second finger in to join the first, casually stroking Loki from the inside in time with his lips arching up and down Loki's cock. 

Loki shifted his shoulders uncomfortably in the straight jacket, finding himself restrained from other expression. He closed his eyes, willing himself to lay back and take it. To take in every eager sloppy kiss to his cock, the way Thor's cheeks flushed with exertion, and how he panted down the line of him. To tolerate the way Thor tended to Loki's body completely, never favouring his cock nor cunt, and not for a moment straying to even consider his own cock. The unfaltering attention was almost endearing. Almost. 

When Thor had convinced himself that Loki was adequately prepared he pulled back, releasing Loki's cock with a slick mess of his own saliva and Loki's precome that dribbled down the base of Thor's chin. Somehow the stained appearance didn't tarnish Thor's golden face, Loki noted with displeasure, as he opened a single eye to watch Thor retreat. 

Thor returned a moment later with a condom and lube, eagerly slipping back onto the bed. He helped move Loki, shifting him, so that he was laying closer to the pillows. 

Thor removed his own pants, stepping out of them and tossing them to the floor. His underwear gone too, Loki had a moment to appreciate Thor's untouched cock, red and hard as it stood erect against the base of golden curls. Thor stripped off his shirt as an afterthought, relinquishing it to the floor, as he crawled toward Loki on the bed. 

Thor slid the condom onto his cock. “I would not wish to harm you, in any way, by any means,” Thor explained as he coated it generously with lube. 

“Pity,” Loki muttered. Thor spared him a long glance, moving on when he took the expression for lingering mistrust rather than the sparsest bit of truth. 

Thor bracketed Loki's hips with his hands, cock lining up to Loki's entrance. 

“Are you ready?” Thor asked as he leaned down to position his hands on the sheets just above Loki's shoulders. His blonde hair fell forwards, trailing down the skin on Loki's neck. Had Loki's hands not been bound behind his back he might have tucked that hair behind Thor's ear, for a start at least. Had Loki not been in the straight jacket they would be playing such a different game.

“Try me,” Loki said flatly. 

Thor took Loki's response for permission and angled his hips forward. His right hand stole back to guide himself inside and with one liquid motion Loki felt Thor enter him. 

Thor fought to keep his hips still, searching Loki's face for any sign before he continued. “That alright?” Thor asked. 

“Are you always this... this...” Loki snarled in exasperation. 

“Careful?” Thor supplied, slipping his hand back up to stroke Loki's cheek with his thumb. 

“Stupid,” Loki retorted with a snort, holding back the wince as his own bristling made Thor's cock jostle inside of him. If he didn't move he could almost forget it was there, but that wasn't quite the point of this. 

“Only you have the talent to make me fumble, make me appear stupid Loki. But not now,” Thor promised, sealing the words with a kiss. 

The kiss started out soft, gentle. The chastest touch of lips. Thor increased the pressure of his lips as he rolled his hips forward, eagerly sinking his cock deeper into Loki. Thor pulled back in time with opening his own lips, letting his tongue dart along Loki's lower lip. 

Loki opened his lips to allow Thor passage. Thor darted his tongue inside in time with his hips rolling back up, gently exploring Loki with both his tongue and cock. With each motion he fluidly rolled, ever gentle, like his whole body was making love to porcelain. 

Loki did not kiss back, only allowing himself to be taken as he widened his lips and Thor sunk deeper inside of him. 

When he felt Thor's tongue explore his palate, Loki bit down. He sunk his teeth into Thor's tongue, crushing the muscle, clamping down even harder as his senses were rewarded with the cooper tang of blood. 

Thor's hips stuttered, jerking his cock out of rhythm inside Loki. 

In the next heartbeat Thor resumed his rolling motion, gracefully slipping in and out of Loki, pulling half way out, before pouring back in. 

Thor brought both his hands to Loki's face and pressed into the soft skin between his lower jaw and cheekbone, prying Loki's mouth open with the pressure. When it became too much Loki spit out Thor's tongue, narrowing his eyes to stare defiantly at the king, blood dribbling down his lower lip. 

Thor stared back at him in serious silence, hips continuing to move in earnest.

“You can never fuck the hate out of me,” Loki hissed, pulling back his lips to reveal teeth drenched in blood. The same blood that Thor tried to ignore as it filled his own mouth, dripping steadily down the back of his throat like a poison.

“This is not fucking Loki, this is lovemaking,” Thor replied blandly, convinced of his own control over the situation.

“Even more useless,” Loki snapped. 

Thor did not miss how his face shifted each time he brought his cock back in, gliding it past the tight ring of muscle at the opening of Loki's vagina. 

“Then it seems I will have to try many times to prove you otherwise,” Thor replied, undeterred, his usual cocky arrogance seeping back into his unperturbed face. 

“You could not, only because I can see your heart,” Loki said, forcing to keep his voice firm between gentle thrusts. If Thor had been pushing in harder he would not have managed, but then if Thor had been fucking him harder he wouldn't have felt the urge to utter the words in the first place. “You will grow tired of this. Perhaps you may even abandon it out of frustration, for you do not truly desire such an act.”

“I see through your lies Loki,” Thor said with a smile, as if he expected Loki to feed him untruths and could not blame him for his nature. He might even understand it. Love it. Loki laughed. 

“Making love to me may temporarily ease your fears, but it will satisfy neither of us. You do not want me to feel loved, to curl up against you, tender and gentle,” Loki went on, licking his lips, tongue coming away splattered in blood. “I am restrained, even now, because you want me this way. You would do anything to keep me as I am: ready to kill you at a moment's notice, because you do not feel safe, without the promise that if you lose control, I will be there to kill you.”

Thor's hips lost their fluid motion, stuttering briefly once again. 

“Do not worry your highness. I await your fall, and when it occurs, I will kill you,” Loki smiled, jerking his hips down to further ruin the pace. 

Thor stared at him, languidly fucking into him, but the pace remained off by just a beat. Slightly erratic. Thor's face was calm but his mind was elsewhere, no longer preoccupied with making love. His body moved automatically, as if he wasn't there at all. 

“You are trying to fuck the crazy out of me Thor, but it is you that needs such actions more than I.”

Thor eyebrow's furrowed, the slightest crack in an otherwise solid facade. 

“You who wants such actions,” Loki went on, smile widening manically with every word, finally deriving pleasure from Thor's awkward and uncomfortable thrusts. “Imagine Thor, it could be you tied up in this coat. You, chained to the bed by your neck. Hands bound. Gagged even, if I pleased, while I fucked into you from behind.” Loki's voice sped up with every word, eagerly unleashing them into the world as he hungrily watched Thor's face wring in indecision. 

“I would fuck you so hard I would own your body, I would desecrate you permanently, so completely, no one would ever dare touch the golden son of Asgard again because you would bare my mark,” Loki hissed with pleasure as Thor's erratic pumping roughened, jerking into Loki frantically. Now that he was there, he couldn't get deep enough inside. Thor was barely pulling his cock out anymore, just jerking with his hips. The electricity sizzled threateningly in the room. 

“And then,” Loki hummed, feeling that Thor was close, just on the edge, “after I had destroyed you, I would kill you,” he purred, raising his head to utter the last words as close to Thor's skin as he could manage while still chained, “because I can.”

Thor spasmed above him, slamming forwards, and riding out his orgasm through the use of Loki's body. Loki allowed him to do so, taking every buck and thrust of Thor's cock. 

The thrusts became less forced, slowing, and then finally stopping altogether. 

Thor let go of himself to drape across Loki's body. In a gesture of trust, fealty, or pure stupidity, Thor allowed his neck to cover Loki's chest, leaving a vital organ dangerously in reach of Loki's teeth. Loki eyed it and smiled, sparing Thor further bloodshed. In the end his brother had pleased him. Loki's cock was still dripping and hard, but there can be ways better than orgasm to be pleased. 

Thor lay there for a few minutes, panting out the aftermath of his release. 

As Thor came to, dragging himself from the hazy after lull, he stared down at Loki to once again search his face.

“Go clean yourself up,” Loki snapped before Thor could say anything. 

Thor was silent, unmoving, for a few moments. Eventually he nodded and eased backward from the bed. 

“I will rest now. You are not to disturb me for the day. If you must sleep, stay on the couch,” Loki ordered. 

Thor blinked, lips tensing in a hard line, but he did not reply. 

“You may resume bothering me tomorrow with your declarations of love, if you dare,” Loki laughed, rolling over in the sheets as much as he could while still being chained and bound. It was remarkably difficult to command order in such a state, but Loki managed it with righteous indignation. 

“Perhaps your prisoner will be more cooperative tomorrow,” Loki said whilst closing his eyes, willing himself to sleep so that he might wake up properly, elsewhere. “Although if I know you, your highness, I imagine you would much desire it otherwise.”


	9. IX

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One day I will be kind to Fandral, one day I will treat him as more than a plot device, but sadly today is not that day ;) This chapter ends on a cliffhanger.

Loki slipped into a consciousness of stiff shoulders and an ache running down his spine. Every shift in the bed caused the pain to flare, a night's worth of restriction punishing him thoroughly. 

He did not need to see his limbs, tangled beneath the sheets, to verify that they were blue. Bound by the straight jacket and handcuffs, Loki's Jötun form was inevitable. The truth that had always unsettled Loki, kept hidden by a careful illusion, was ripped from his control and branded upon his skin in Thor's dreams. Loki stifled the disgruntled scowl forming on his face, replacing it with a reasonably set jaw. 

“Thor?” he called experimentally into the room. Flat on his back and with little recourse for movement, Thor could have been three feet away and Loki wouldn't have noticed. 

Thor's golden hair appeared in Loki's line of sight. “You are awake,” Thor greeted him with a relieved sigh. 

Loki allowed Thor to help him sit up, sticking his legs out to brace himself on the bed. Loki's hands remained cradled awkwardly behind him. 

When he was properly adjusted, confident he wouldn't fall over, Loki shook his shoulders, snapping, “was there ever any doubt?” at Thor.

Thor hastily withdrew at Loki's resistance. “What are you asking of me?” Thor said.

“Either you are besotted with me and you comment on my every action like a lovesick bard or there was some disturbance you have yet to inform me of,” Loki replied flatly. Had he been unbound Loki would have absentmindedly picked at his nails or ran a careless hand through his hair. In the moment he settled for staring blankly at Thor, mustering a look of disdainful boredom. “I find myself confronted with two equally likely options, so I hope you understand that I must feign having to decide between them.”

“It is so early in the day-” 

“I see I must speak more clearly to get my intentions past your thick skull,” Loki interrupted. “Tell me. Now.”

“Or?” Thor said with a raised eyebrow, but the gesture was a halfhearted dare that failed to appropriately mask his uneasiness from Loki's prying eyes. 

“Tell me and I will fix it,” Loki appealed to the worry he saw in Thor. “I will fix everything.” The words came with a tight lipped smile best reserved for serpents about to unlatch their jaws. 

“It could not hurt to tell you,” Thor said, more to himself. His gaze fell to his hands, avoiding the visible reminder of Loki's scrutiny to fumble with an old scab on his palm.

“No, it could not,” Loki assured him almost pleasantly. 

“You have slept for over twenty-four hours.”

Loki stared blankly ahead, pupils darting to focus on the wall behind Thor's head. He fought to keep his face empty. He should have spent a whole day in the real world before returning to Thor's dreams; either that hadn't happened or Loki didn't remember it. This time the two options before Loki were valid and terribly so. 

“Did I?” Loki mused aloud blandly, forcing a vague disinterest. 

“At first I believed you to be exhausted, but after the eleventh hour I attempted to wake you. I failed Loki. You could not be waken,” Thor said. He looked up. “I was very worried.” 

“So you wanted me to wake, and I did not?” Loki asked slowly, the possibility vexing him. 

“More than anything,” Thor replied with a sad smile. 

“You know this is a dream Thor.” It was a risk, but Loki's tongue was the only weapon he still had access to. 

“Yes, I am aware.” Thor's lips flattened out to a grim line, as if defiant to the reminder. 

“Why do you care what happens to me here?”

Thor slipped forward, placing his knee on the bed. He refrained from touching Loki, fingers betraying his desire as they absentmindedly trailed over the bed covers. “It matters.” 

“Why?”

“If this is the closest I can get to you, I do not want it to end.” 

Loki's eyes widened in spite of himself, pupils dilating in momentary panic upon being confronted with the problem. If Thor didn't want it to end, it probably wouldn't end. Loki's tongue darted over his bottom lip, inhaling sharply at the unfamiliar surge of arousal at the utterly inopportune realization. Arousal and the instinctual drive to lash out at whatever had backed him into the corner. 

“What makes you think this is close, Thor? You have me here because I am chained. Have I not told you, warned you, what I would do to you should I find the opportunity?” Loki hissed through clenched teeth. 

Thor remained leaning against the bed, seemingly unaffected by Loki's bristling. “I only require more time,” Thor replied, completely sure of himself. 

“Time for what? I am a figment of your unconscious. It is not me you need to convince of anything.” Loki leaned forward, dangerously close to falling on his face should he lose his balance. “I am not real.”

“I know that.”

“Then act like it. Stop playing this ridiculous game. In your wildest dreams, you cannot even conceive of a me that loves you.” Loki's lips drew back into a snarl of gritted teeth and angry lines. 

Thor leaned in to Loki's advance in spite of himself, or perhaps to prove himself wrong. Thor brought his lips down to Loki's in a kiss. 

Loki didn't react at first, which only made Thor more urgent. Thor's hands swept up to Loki's face, one cradling his brother's neck and the other stroking his jaw.

Loki leaned into Thor's touch, head falling forward to break the kiss and cradle on Thor's shoulder. 

Thor's arms slipped around Loki's back to hug and support him, bracing Loki upright against his own body. 

Loki traced his nose along the soft skin of Thor's neck, nuzzling into the sensitive area. Thor shivered under the administration. Loki smiled against Thor's skin and in a single fluid movement he opened his mouth and sunk his teeth into his brother's neck. 

Thor jerked at the pain. The familiar stench of ozone trickled into Loki's nostrils as he inhaled sharply, gasping for air as he worried his teeth into Thor's skin, filling his mouth with blood. 

Loki released his hold with a slick sound, spitting blood and saliva on the bed. 

“End this,” Loki hissed inches from Thor's face, teeth stained red. 

“If you feel you must punish me, do so, I will not stop you,” Thor said resolutely, eyes glossy with pain. 

“But I am not punishing you. I am not here,” Loki snarled, struggling with his shoulders to pull away from Thor, frustrated with his unexpected response. “You are just giving in to your own masochistic desires instead of actually apologizing to me.”

Thor winced, shock pink on his face, as if Loki had hit him. 

“It is as if you are masturbating to the thought of my rage, afraid to confront it because you know I do not desire you the sick way you desire me,” Loki snarled, spurred on by finally garnering a reaction. 

“I am sorry, brother.” Thor's voice didn't match the words, resisting them all the way out. They cut up his tongue and left the beginnings of a scowl on his face, his body rejecting the obeisance he had been raised to expect from everyone else.

“Make it better,” Loki demanded. 

“How?” Thor said, the open wound on his neck already forgiven. 

“Wake up. Appease me.” A dark smile flashed across Loki's bloodied face. “To begin, return the book you stole from me.” 

“Perhaps that might make an appropriate apology,” Thor muttered to himself. 

“A beginning,” Loki corrected him firmly. Questions about why Thor had taken the book in the first place flared on Loki's tongue, but as the supposed voice of Thor's unconscious he didn't trust asking them. There were other ways to ascertain the information and he was already ahead. 

“Now release these bindings, surely I do not need them,” Loki ordered, eager to burn all the bridges while he was at it. 

Thor's eyebrows furrowed, jaw opening as if he were about to speak but the words withered half-formed on his tongue.

“Never mind,” Loki snapped furtively. “Just leave me. Now.” 

Thor slipped off the bed, nodding once. He exited the chamber without another word. 

Loki fell back against the bed with a huff, shifting awkwardly onto his side to avoid further cramping his hands. Loki scrunched his eyes and waited for sleep now that Thor had agreed to release him from the dream. 

He waited, only it did not come. 

“Thor?” Loki called out again, voice leaden with frustration. If his body couldn't be persuaded to sleep there was the matter of entertainment for his remaining time in the dream.

“THOR!” Loki shouted, the force of it shaking his body in its bindings. 

The chamber door opened slowly, creaking, to allow a person past.

“Finally. I was beginning to think I would be required to include hard of hearing to your list of faults, but with lacklustre intelligence you certainly could not manage any more,” Loki grumbled.

“Do you actually speak to the king that way?” A surprised voice greeted him, shrill in its teetering between amusement and panic.

Loki strained to lift his head. Footsteps announced the person moving closer. Not Thor. Fandral. 

“Go find Thor,” Loki snapped, dropping his head with a thud into the pillow. 

“The king,” Fandral stressed, the point lost on Loki, “requested that I remain here should you have any needs. He has important business to attend to.” 

Loki rolled over in the bed to turn the side of his face towards Fandral, eyeing him speculatively. “Important business?” he probed.

“Aye, although of what he did not say.” 

“Probably has important business with mead,” Loki muttered darkly, rolling his eyes, thoroughly annoyed that Thor had already slunk away from his grasp. 

“You have very low thoughts of him,” Fandral observed. 

“He has his uses,” Loki acquiesced with a smirk. 

Fandral frowned, much more perturbed at the implicit threat than a guard ought to be of a prisoner bound so effectively they could not even sit up. 

“So he left you to tend to my needs,” Loki began again, almost genially. 

“Yes, do you have any?” Fandral said with a stiff bow. 

“Does the king often instruct you to be so obedient towards his prisoners?”

“You are a prince, heir to Jötunheim.”

“And yet I am in chains and confined to his bedroom like his personal concubine.”

“Well, we cannot have everything we want,” Fandral said with a meek smile and shrug. 

“You certainly do not know me very well,” Loki said flatly, glancing Fanral over once again. “Come here.”

Fandral took a single step closer, hesitating, their previous fight not forgotten.

“Here, on the bed. Help me sit,” Loki demanded flatly. 

It was a reasonable request. Fandral nodded and used his hands to help Loki sit up, fingers resting for slightly longer than necessary on the bare skin of Loki's palms before trailing away. 

“Good.” The word came out cold and chiding. “Now, help me stand.”

Fandral supported Loki by holding onto his arms just beneath his shoulders, moving him and helping him get up from the bed. 

Upon being released Loki tottered unsteadily, requiring Fandral to grab him before he fell. 

Loki stared up at him through a curtain of dark hair, saying “thank you,” as he shook his head back to push the hair from his eyes. Fandral tucked the loose strands behind Loki's ear for him with a cautious touch. 

Loki smiled tentatively, drawing the look out for maximum effectiveness. “Now, would you be so kind as to help me to the bath?”

“I do not think I-”

“I have needs,” Loki stressed with an encouraging smile. “Did not your king instruct you to fill them? It would also be safer if you did. You may take this wretched jacket off me, as it was only put on so as not to frighten the healers. I do not see any of them here,” Loki said softly. “Only you, and I am confident in your abilities that you can handle me, should be necessary.” 

Fandral laughed faintly, the interest eager across his face, blotting out better judgement. “Right, I am sure it will be fine,” Fandral said, leading Loki by the arm to Thor's bathroom. 

“Oh, it will be absolutely perfect,” Loki promised him.


	10. X

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This March was probably the busiest month I have ever had; being a graduate student is difficult! Have a slightly longer chapter than usual to make up for the wait. Have another cliffhanger because I'm a terrible person. <3 
> 
> If you're reading this you probably don't need warnings, but the line between sex and violence gets really thin in this chapter (almost nonexistent). That well intentioned bdsm etiquette from the first sex scene is pretty much thrown out the window.
> 
> Heads up: I will be ending this fic within the next 1-3 chapters. It will end at a place where all loose ends are tied up and it makes sense for it to be over, but there will also be room to come back in a few months and write a sequel if I want.

To kill or not to kill Fandral; the options rolled around in Loki's mind. Seduce or destroy? 

“Run the water,” Loki commanded flatly, face revealing nothing of his quandary. 

Fandral confidently led Loki to the edge of the bathtub, guiding him to sit on the lip. Upon straightening him so he should not fall over Fandral turned on the tap. The sound of rushing water and steam filled the room, fogging up the mirrors within minutes. 

A few strands of Loki's hair had fallen from behind his ears, slipping into his face. Fandral tucked them behind Loki's ear again automatically, fingers lingering on Loki's cool blue skin. Loki stared up at him pointedly but did not pull away.

Fandral cleared his throat awkwardly. “You are not like any Jötun I have seen before.” His voice was gentle. Flattering, or at least to another audience. 

“Might that be because by the end of our encounters, my head remains attached to my shoulders?” 

Fandral pulled his hand back with a faint frown, indiscernible if it was reserved for Loki or himself. 

“Oh do go on. Do not stop yourself on my account,” Loki said in a tone much too cheerful to be real. “Was it not you who would have taken me for his prisoner had I not been so useful to Thor?” Loki leaned closer, requiring Fandral to reach out to steady him so he didn't fall. Still bound in the straitjacket, every movement became a ploy for contact. “How disappointing it must have been, that I was useful to someone else,” Loki breathed onto the skin of Fandral's face from inches away. “The things we might have already done if that were not true.”

“What would you goad me into?” Fandral asked, not bothering to mask his wariness. Beyond that was an interest that lurked just below the surface, close enough to be plainly visible. 

“Undress me. Find out,” Loki dared.

“Thor is my friend.”

Loki bristled at the unspoken implication that fucking him would be wronging Thor, as if Loki were Thor's property to be stolen. As if Loki could be unfairly taken and was no longer someone who could choose his own bed partners, by default relegated to Thor alone. 

“I could be your friend,” Loki purred, revealing nothing of his indignation.

Fandral laughed. “Not in the same way.” He shook his head in amusement. 

“So you have never desired Thor in such a way?” Loki probed, eager for what this fictitious version of Fandral could tell him of Thor. Had his brother ever desired one of his closest friends or thought that Fandral desired him? 

“He is attractive,” Fandral admitted.

“But you would not instigate it?” Loki prompted.

“No, likely not.”

“What if someone else instigated it?” Loki asked thoughtfully. 

“What do you imply?”

“I ought not to say this,” Loki pretended to second guess himself. He glanced around the room for effect, blood red eyes lingering on the closed door. “Thor mentioned you once, in passing.”

“In passing?”

“When we were,” Loki cleared his throat, and feigned embarrassment, “you know.” He arched his eyebrows. “Having sex.” That last came out in a whisper. 

“What did he say exactly?” Fandral's voice was unsteady.

“That he would not be opposed to you joining us. Might even like it actually if you did,” Loki said, pretending to gain courage as he went on. 

“Thor said this?” Fandral asked speculatively.

Loki nodded emphatically. “Why else would he tell you to tend to my needs? Obviously I would need a bath, after going without for so long. Really the perfect excuse for you to get me naked. For him to return and join us.”

“Thor does not plot like that,” Fandral said with a frown, drawing away. 

“Wait, wait, alright,” Loki sighed loudly. “So it was my idea and Thor merely agreed. We thought that you might not wish to participate should you realize how thoroughly we had planned such an encounter.” The lies came easily to him, falling off his tongue like water. How swiftly he would wreak havoc in Thor's dreams, for the man who made himself king had still not learned his place. 

“Truly?” Fandral asked, never having been fitted armour to match the weapons of the god of lies. 

“Of course. Would I fabricate something of such importance?” Loki said pleasantly. In the handcuffs and straightjacket he managed to appear pitiful rather than threatening. 

“I do not know,” Fandral wavered. 

“You know why your king chose me as his own. I alone can save him from the berserker rage. I alone can save your entire kingdom from his wrath. Would someone Thor trusts with such a task be untrustworthy?”

“No,” Fandral admitted. 

“Exactly. You would do well not to question the judgement of your king,” Loki said, the words drawing his lips into a dangerous smile. “Now do help me with these restraints.” He shook his wrists for emphasis. 

Fandral slipped to the edge of the tub and sat behind Loki. His fingers went for the buckles, jerking at the fabric of the straightjacket. 

In the clouded mirror Loki noticed Fandral's right hand favouring undoing the buckles in a downward fashion. Instead of just pulling the fabric out of the buckle Fandral's right hand pulled down, making unnecessary extra movements, accidentally snagging the fabric now and then. Loki watched as the gestures kept Fandral's right hand in the vicinity of his hip, inches above the knife tucked into his belt. So, he was not completely convinced. 

“What about these?” Loki shook his wrists again, the chains clinking behind him. 

“I do not think so.”

“You will not be able to take the jacket off while I wear them,” Loki pointed out. 

“Then I shall have to be creative.”

“Mm, and how is that?”

Loki couldn't keep his eyes from widening as Fandral pulled the knife from its place at his hip. In a single motion he brought it down through the straightjacket, tearing a line in the cloth covering Loki's torso. Within a minute the entire contraption was in shreds. 

“Thor will not be pleased you wasted a perfectly good coat,” Loki said tersely. 

“He will think otherwise when he sees what it was obscuring,” Fandral replied heatedly. Loki felt the other man's breath trickle down his newly exposed skin.

Fandral helped Loki stand. He removed Loki's pants with none of the innuendo or advances Loki had expected, instead carefully depositing the other man into the bathtub when he had finished. Loki's hands pressed uncomfortably into his spine, trapped between his back and the tub. What little movements were available to him made no improvement on the discomfort. Fandral was too preoccupied with swiftly discarding his own shirt and pants to notice. Loki watched him deposit his knife on the far end of the tub, still within Fandral's grasp as he slipped in to join Loki. 

“So,” Loki said flatly. 

“So,” Fandral repeated, eyes flashing. 

Loki allowed his eyes to trail down to Fandral's cock, distorted slightly by the water, but definitely flush and partially hard. Instead of imagining how good it would feel to have that cock inside him, or how pleasant it would be to suck, Loki found himself displeased by how far away the knife was. A messy castration would be difficult. Difficult, but not impossible. It was that thought, rather than all the others, that Loki found made his own body surge with a jolt of pleasure. It was Loki's own arousal, at last, that nudged him towards the decision he had been wrestling with since the moment he had first seen Fandral. Fuck or kill? How about both. Simultaneously or one after the other? At least there were some mysteries still left in life. Loki smiled, an expression Fandral mistook for something far less sinister than it was. He returned the look naively. 

Loki crawled towards Fandral through the water, moving slowly on his knees and with his hands still cuffed behind his back. 

Fandral drew up to meet him, propped up on his own knees. Their lips made first contact, closing the distance with a kiss. 

Fandral's arms slid around Loki's back, drawing the other man into him, their skin pressing from head to knee. Loki could feel Fandral's cock, pressed between his own cock and thigh. The incentive of danger had entrusted Loki was not betrayed by his own body; his cock was similarly hard, pressed against Fandral's thigh on the other side. 

A single roll of Loki's hips made Fandral moan into the kiss, the sensation of their cocks dragging against each other delivering both with a surge of pleasure. The feeling was sorely inadequate without the accompanying danger of electricity crawling down his skin, but Loki wasn't doing this for his own satisfaction anyways. Still, he could barely contain the disdainful snort at the possibility that Thor had ruined him for other men. 

“How, how, do you want to do this?” Fandral pulled up from the kiss long enough to pant out the words. 

“Help me onto my back,” Loki said, breaking the kiss completely. He turned so that his back was towards the long end of the tub. With a side step he was closest to the side Fandral had started on. The side where he had deposited the knife. “With you inside me.” That seemed to be enough to convince Fandral; he moved forward quickly and helped lower Loki so that his back was against the tub. 

“Not enough room,” Loki complained with a mild laugh. “Help me so my back is against the short end of the tub. More room for my legs,” Loki reasoned. He shifted to the side of the tub where the knife was. It was so logical for him to move over there, already closer to that. If Fandral made the connection it wasn't obvious. He helped move Loki to the other side without a word. 

“Good,” Loki smiled, forcing himself to sound pleasant rather than condescending. Not one of his strong points. Fucking Thor was certainly easier; there was little need to pretend niceties then. The thought left Loki startled, fighting to regain his composure. 

“Drain the bath. Get the lube. Thor has some in his nightstand,” Loki commanded, a little too firmly. He apologized with a kiss. 

Fandral kissed him back roughly, eagerly, tongue flicking across Loki's lower lip. “I'll be right back.”

When Fandral was out of the room Loki used his shoulder to knock the knife into the tub. Luckily it fell into the tub rather than outside, but he barely avoiding slicing up his thigh in the process. Loki stilled, waiting to see if Fandral had overheard anything. 

After a moment Loki slunk lower into the tub, grabbing the knife between his bound hands. He used his right hand to slot the blade into the handcuffs, pressing dangerously against his left hand. If he moved too much he would slice himself, but without being able to see the handcuffs it was the only secure position he could feel. His right hand would be able to draw out the knife by its handle, for all the good that would do. 

Fandral returned to the bathroom with the bottle of lube. He slipped into the tub and pulled the plug, water draining out. 

Loki scrutinized Fandral's naked form, calculating where each part would be when Fandral was on top of him. It would be impossible to kill Fandral outright, but there were some places he might reach that could lead to a prolonged death. Some places. Loki smiled again, finding himself once more in good spirits. 

Fandral brought his lips to Loki's, spare hand massaging Loki's thigh. 

“Do not be gentle,” Loki said. It came out in a pleading whisper, more real than Loki had intended. Intimacy from Thor had been disturbing. From Fandral it would be impossible. 

Loki wondered if Fandral had even heard him, until he felt the other man hastily snap back the cap of the lube, barely pausing to coat his fingers before shoving two of them inside of Loki's ass. Even lubricated it was a tight fit. Loki was about to inform Fandral that he also had a vagina, but the movement of the other man's fingers silenced him. 

“That okay?” Fandral asked, perhaps catching sight of the wince of pain on Loki's face. 

“The god of thunder has fucked me. How can you imagine that anything you might do to me should hurt?” Loki hissed, barely holding back the will to spit out that nothing Fandral could do would even make an impact. It was extremely poor social etiquette to emasculate your lovers before they had fucked you. After that Loki was of a different mind, but only if they were no longer of use. Fandral would wear his use out extremely quickly. He would wear it out all over the tub in the same beautiful red of Thor's cape, Loki imagined fondly. Such thoughts kept Loki appropriately hard while Fandral fucked his fingers into him.

Fandral was certainly not being gentle, ramming Loki's back into the tub with every thrust. Loki could already feel the knife, locked in his left handcuff, slicing into his skin. His wrist was soon slick with his own blood. Loki allowed himself to gasp, letting Fandral mistake the sound of pleasure as connected to something he meant to be doing. 

“Good?” Fandral panted.

“Yes, yes,” Loki whispered back, even single syllable words choked off by Fandral's rough thrusts. He added a third finger soon after. 

Spurred on by Loki's encouragement, Fandral's left hand grabbed Loki's cock. He widened his fist to include his own and jerked them together, soft enough that neither would spill, but tight enough that Loki could not ignore the sensation. 

“Yes, yes,” Loki repeated heatedly, eager when he noticed Fandral was staring at his own fist and their cocks held together. 

Loki shifted his left wrist, grabbing the handle of the knife with his right hand. Slippery with his own blood, the knife clattered to the bottom of the tub. 

Fandral went still, eyes stealing to Loki's face. He had slipped it into indifference. Too indifferent. Fandral glanced down to find the knife at the bottom of the tub. 

They both went for it at the same time, Loki trying to cover it up with his body as he slunk lower into the tub. He only managed to slice up the back of his thigh, Fandral easily wrestling the knife away from a bound Loki. 

Fandral held the knife above his head, eyes wide at the blade coated in the blood. “What is this?” he snarled. Loki had never seen him angry before. If the man before him wasn't capable of killing him he might have paused longer to dwell on how peculiar a sight it was. Fandral the dashing all riled up and deadly. He paused anyways; the image was too tempting to ignore. 

“What is it?” Fandral yelled, shocking Loki back to attention. 

“It fell, when my back hit the tub.”

“It's covered in your blood,” Fandral growled low. 

“Of course it is. I had forgotten the knife was there and I was so startled that I accidentally sat on the blade,” Loki said in a reasonably calm voice, eyebrows furrowing as if he might be bothered by the fact that Fandral didn't believe him. Fandral, who had just been making love to him. Loki frowned for emphasis. 

Fandral seemed on the verge of Loki's manipulation when the bathroom door slammed open. Loki felt electricity choke out the air in the room, rolling in on a deadly cloud of fury, before he had the chance to turn around and look up at the rage he knew would be ripe across Thor's face.


	11. XI

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i only dropped one hint about the turn this chapter takes, pretty early on in the story, so i'm curious how that works for people. :)

Fandral's face fell into confusion, mouth agape and skin blanching. “Th-” he began.

“Out.” The command ripped through the charged air with the full elemental force of the god of thunder. 

Loki watched with disappointment as Fandral stood, stumbling out of the bathtub, and bolted from the room. Loki released a sigh, tempered only by the promise of Thor's wrath choking out the oxygen in the bathroom. 

His blood red eyes slid up his brother. “Something the matter?” Loki purred. 

“Out. You as well.” 

Loki arched an eyebrow but complied. 

Thor grabbed Loki as he stepped from the tub. At the feel of those calloused hands encircling his forearms, completely restricting him, Loki tensed involuntarily. The spike of fear was met with a rush of pleasure, indistinguishable from another. It was the fear that brought the pleasure; the pleasure that encouraged the fear. The lengths Loki might go to provoke Thor, every casualty worth the peace he felt in that moment he stared into the face of destruction. 

Except Thor did not destroy. The handcuffs fell to the floor with a clink. This time the confusion on Loki's face was real. 

“What is this?” Loki snapped, frantically searching Thor's face for something to use. He rubbed his numb wrists in disbelief. 

“Your release,” Thor replied flatly. 

Loki laughed, tongue darting out to lick his lower lip. “Oh. Oh.” He laughed again, low and bitter. “So you wish to banish me from your precious Asgard? Have I become too difficult to keep?” Loki's eyes hardened. “Do you not know, brother, that if you catch a hornet it is wise to run away after you release it? I suspect not because you were never wise.” Loki's fists clenched. Frost surged through his veins. He gasped at the return of ice and magic, collecting in his fingertips, until they glowed a dangerous blue and green.

“All I have been doing is running away,” Thor said calmly, unperturbed by the threat. 

“From yourself, because you cannot face the reality of your dark desires,” Loki hissed. “Is this another one of your masochistic fantasies then? Where I inflict pain on you for the wrong you have done?” A blade of frost curled down Loki's forearm. “Tired of being gutted by a knife? Thought you might prefer something else?”

Loki took a step towards Thor, smirking to himself as Thor's blue eyes couldn't help but glance over his naked body. Loki was still wet and dripping from the bath. He could feel his cock hard against his own thigh, getting off on the unexpected return of his magic. “Have you been a bad boy Thor?” Loki laughed coldly. “Must I punish you for your dark thoughts?” The smile was wicked, all violence, without the promise of sex that usually softens such a look. 

“They were never dark Loki. Only you thought they were.” Thor's right hand twitched as if he were about to raise it to stroke Loki's face, but he caught himself in time. The tension remained thick in the room. 

“I think nothing. This is entirely your fabrication. Your dream,” Loki snarled accusingly, gritting his teeth. 

“What a cunning trick. To hide the falsification in plain sight, protecting it by claiming it is my doing rather than your own.” There was an anger in Thor's words, flaring out with every syllable, but it smouldered instead of flared. Thor seemed angry at himself. 

The glow from Loki's hands fizzled, unsettled by his confusion. “Wh-”

“Do not speak brother,” Thor interrupted him, lips drawn in a tight smile. “You can do nothing but implicate yourself further, when at last I may have finally wronged you.”

“At last?” Loki snorted, his criticisms unfettered by his own nakedness and Thor's warning. “May have?”

“I kept leaving because I did not know what to do Loki. The more I punished you, the more you rebelled. I thought time away would give me the space to decide what to do, but I would only return because I could not stay away. I do not want to stay away.” Thor laughed at himself, as if the words were some terrible irony or cosmic joke. “Perhaps I court my own suicidal fantasy as I try to out-trick the trickster-”

“When have you ever tricked me?” Loki cut him off with a condescending laugh. 

“My surrender.” 

Loki's lips drew in a tight line. “What do you mean your surrender?” he hissed, masking the answer that fell into his stomach like lead. The first night between them, when Loki had finally desecrated the god of thunder, had been a lie. Fitting, but the irony chaffed Loki. 

“I thought if only you had it, you would understand that I have always loved you, that I would do anything for you,” Thor professed. He shifted awkwardly. “But it was selfish of me to give something to you and expect it to fix us, to expect that without consulting you, that I knew best.” For so long Thor had been apologizing for slights Loki had imagined, but this one, at last real, was unfamiliar on his tongue. 

“You did not give me anything,” Loki swore through gritted teeth. “I was there Thor. I know what happened.”

“You are not the only one that lies,” Thor said with another sad smile. “And I am sorry.”

Loki's eyebrows furrowed, the only signal that his mind was reeling through the unexpected shift in the situation, scampering to find a way back on top. “Why did you think to give me that here?” 

“Because you would only come close enough to accept my surrender where you thought you were safe, bundled in your layers of lies and mischief.”

“And how did you know I was bundled in lies?” Loki snapped. 

“I awoke one day in my bed to find you beside me, your hand clasped in mine.” Thor laughed softly, another cosmic joke, a cruel twist of fate. “And I instantly knew something was wrong.” Loki would have never been that close and meant it. 

Thor had known since the first night: the night Loki had knocked him out in the dream. Loki fought for some semblance of control, jaw twitching.

“But it was wrong of me to take away your choices because I thought I knew what you needed. I do not. I never did,” Thor frowned sadly. “You have your freedom so you can decide for yourself what you need. Whatever that may be.” He gestured at Loki's hands. 

“I was going to kill Fandral, you know,” he said flatly, words not matching his calm voice. “What if that is how I choose to use my freedom? What would you do then, my king?” The last word fell out caustic and vile from his tongue, an insult rather than the praise such a word often demands. 

“You would have killed him with your dick?” Thor glanced down at it, no longer hard. It was clear between the pair of them that Loki had been bound and relatively helpless, a knowledge that ate away at Thor. Loki seemed content to pretend such a thing had not existed. 

“Well first I was going to fuck him,” Loki said with a casual roll of his shoulders.

“When I came upon you both it appeared as if Fandral would have fucked you,” Thor pointed out. 

Loki's eyebrows furrowed. “Why do you not care?” he hissed, face falling back into the displeasure that had been brewing all the while beneath the surface. His witty banter was devoured by fury and frustration.

“You are not mine to control Loki. You never were.”

Loki opened his mouth to send back a scathing retort, but he closed it with a frown. Temporarily. 

“I will leave you to determine what it is you need. I cannot tell you and I would rather not argue. Should what you need include me I will be in the great hall. Should it not...” Thor trailed off. His lips tensed in a flat line. “That is your decision.” 

“You attempt to free me, and yet you provide me with ultimatums,” Loki snapped.

“It is not an ultimatum.”

“A trap,” Loki hissed. 

“I wish you would not feel that way, but I can do nothing of it,” Thor said, bowing stiffly. He pulled an object from the folds of his cloak, deposited it on the counter, and left. 

Loki frowned, perturbed that he had not realized Thor had been holding something during their conversation. Upon ensuring that Thor had indeed left the bathroom and the room Loki rolled his eyes and approached the counter. 

Loki's eyes widened when he reached the counter, staring blankly at the book that had started it all.


	12. XII

It had stopped being about the book a long time ago, the premise at last clear with the object in Loki's grasp. His fingers trailed casually across the cover while he leaned against the bathroom counter. The intensity of Loki's touch dwindled in the reign of tepid disappointment. Even his anger had burned out, in its wake a shallow emptiness left behind. No rage nor fury blossomed in his chest, no longer urging him on to ever more sinister deeds. Deeds that once staggered the golden king of Asgard to his knees. Or at least, had seemed to. There was no pleasure nor satisfaction to be had; this was not his victory. 

Loki sighed flatly. Days worth of lies destroyed, all built on a rotting foundation. Thor had known all along. 

His fingers flicked past the pages in agitation. A myriad of spells swept past his eyes, written in lost languages that spoke to him alone. They once might have promised him triumph or trickery, but the futile gestures of skimming magic brought him nothing. The book was at hand, and yet no longer the object of his interests. It gave him nothing; hadn't he come out on top? Somehow Thor denied him even his failure, and with it rightful fury. Loki's jaw set in a firm line. 

Loki stormed out of the bathroom, barely remembering to dress himself before he left the king's chambers. He borrowed a spare shirt and pair of pants from Thor's dressers and tucked the book beneath his arm. It had no real literary use anymore, but it might provide a suitable heavy object to throw at Thor's thick skull. 

As he had said, Thor was waiting in the great hall. He seemed to have exerted control over the dream because the enormous room was uncharacteristically empty. 

Loki slammed the book on the table in front of Thor. His presence earned a startled look from Thor and the slight raise of his eyebrow. “Made up your mind already, brother?”

“How dare you?” Loki seethed. 

“How dare I what?” Thor said with a frown. He sat up a little straighter. From the red marks on his hands he had been wringing them together.

“Give this to me.” Loki's eyes glanced at the book on the table.

Thor crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, face hardening. “You requested it,” Thor accused his brother. 

“When did I do such a thing?” Loki snapped impatiently. The reds of his eyes stood out against the deep royal blue of his skin, making the cold expression on his face both alien and familiar. 

“You instructed me that returning the book would be the start of my amends,” Thor said firmly, no longer amendable to being pushed around. Loki gritted his teeth at the unwelcome change, or perhaps the challenge it presented. 

“Before I knew of your lies,” Loki rebuffed.

“Why do my untruths alter the circumstances?” 

“I wanted you to give me the book.” Loki said the sentence very slowly, enunciating every syllable with a dangerous flash of teeth. 

“You wanted me to have to give you the book,” Thor said, softer then. 

Loki's lips tightened and he did not reply. 

“You wanted my terror. You wanted my fear,” Thor went on, barely above a whisper. His blue eyes firmly stared into Loki's, holding his gaze. “You wanted my compliance.”

“Yes,” Loki said the word in a shiver that racked his body involuntarily. 

“You have always had the latter.” 

“It is useless given freely.” Loki placed his hand on the table, palm flat across the cover of the book. He leaned down and held his face inches from Thor's. “I want to pull it broken, right through your ribcage, and out with your heart.” He licked his lower lip involuntarily. 

“Compliance is still valuable when freely given,” Thor said, unmoved by his brother's proximity. 

Loki laughed in his face. “Pretty, that you think so.” He began to frown, even as the laughter carried on. “But then you would think so, because you think I always gave mine to you because I wanted to.” 

Thor opened his mouth to speak, to comment on Loki's absolute lack of compliance, how he was so utterly far from even a shred of compliance, but stopped himself. He closed his mouth and hummed faintly instead. “And what is the truth?” A laughable question to pose to the god of lies, but it was the one Thor settled on. 

“I had no choice. I could never do anything but admire you and want to please you, the perfect golden son.” 

“And so you want to break me, like you think I have broken you.” 

“Maybe,” Loki said, not one to be pinned down. “Or perhaps there is no reason and I just think the sounds you would make, while I choked you out, would be rather erotic,” Loki purred, smiling again.

Thor leaned forward, closing the gap, and kissed his brother. Their lips met for a second. 

Loki surged backwards, shoving Thor away. 

Thor fell off his chair in the commotion. He stared up at Loki from the floor, who was bristling at the other end of the table. 

“How dare you!” Loki started again. 

“What is it this time?” Thor sighed, brushing himself off as he wearily stood. 

“I...” Loki frowned. His eyebrows furrowed and his mouth set in a hard line as he sought out a legitimate source of his anger. “Why do I have a vagina?” he demanded. 

“Pardon?” Thor asked in surprise, the question completely unconnected to the rebuffed kiss. And yet it was entirely like Loki that they would not speak of it, instead getting lost in word games.

“You have seen it,” Loki said with a murderous roll of his eyes. “Why is it there?”

“Well, sometimes, you see, people have these genit-”

“THOR!” Loki shouted, cutting him off. A hard sheen of ice collected involuntarily along the underside of his palm. “I do not have one outside of your dreams.”

“How would I know that?”

“I just do not! Why do I have one here?” Loki demanded. His shoulders squared off, ready for the fight he both instigated and felt was created by Thor. 

“What do you want me to tell you?” 

“The truth,” Loki demanded. 

Thor tried not to laugh. 

Loki sneered at him. “Tell me what you did to me, here, of all places.”

“Why here of all places?”

“Because this is your dream! Whatever you want! Why would you want me to be a woman? What, am I not good enough for you the way I am?” Loki snarled, eyes flashing. 

“No!” Thor shouted. “No.” He shook his head and frowned. “That is certainly not true, and if it were, why would I not make you completely a woman?” Thor reasoned. 

Loki shrugged off the response. “Well then, why both?”

“I am not quite certain...” Thor trailed off under the scrutiny of Loki's hard glare. “However, it may have something to do with how I think of you. How I have always thought of you.” He paused, waiting for the angry interruption or correction that never came. “I understand everyone sees you as a man, but I never have. Not as a woman either.... I never thought of you as having a true gender,” Thor admitted. 

Thor stared at Loki, finding his face softened, but relatively blank and secretive. “You shift so easily between them, as if this fluidity, this in between, is who you really are,” Thor said with a shrug. “Perhaps, in my mind, you are both, at once, because I have never seen you as only one.” 

“And this does not... bother you?” Loki's eyebrows furrowed. 

“No, not at all,” Thor said hastily, pleased with the sudden turn in the conversation, even if it was destined to have a relatively short lifespan. “I know I call you my brother... but only because we were raised as such. Even when we were young, and you were lithe, and delicate, and dangerous, to me you were always both,” Thor said. He smiled sadly. “Always everything.” And it was clear between them that he didn't just mean by gender. 

Loki frowned, but by his silence Thor suspected it was acceptance. Still, he couldn't let it lie. “I would give you everything Loki,” Thor said. 

“Your giving is no different than taking,” Loki snapped, back into the thick of their argument again, but the bite from his voice was still compromised. Temporarily detained. 

“And what would you rather I do?” Thor asked. 

“That... that is the point,” Loki snarled, shaking his head. 

Thor frowned, but waited for his brother to continue and find his words. How strange these dreams were, to thwart Loki's composure so. 

“Stop offering. Stop giving. I do not... want it,” Loki said with a frustrated sigh. 

“But you do want it. Do you not?”

Loki glanced away.

“Shall I do a better job at pretending my surrender is real?” Thor prompted. The return of Loki's gaze was not an improvement, as he had resigned to glowering darkly at Thor again. 

“I do not require your pity,” Loki grumbled through gritted teeth. “Do you not recall what I did the last time you pretended to lose?” It seemed like months ago when they had sparred, after Thor had stolen the book from the library, and Loki had stabbed him after his brother had helped him stand up. Not very much time had passed between that event and the current conversation at all, and yet everything had changed. Everything, but they were still bickering. 

“What happened to my waiting to see what you would do when I at last released you?” 

“Killing you is currently not interesting. Or arousing.” Loki shifted his wait, but only held out his hand and stared at his nails. “You are very boring indeed.”

Thor watched his brother carefully, looking for the frays at the disguise he held, seeking out the real emotion beneath the facade. Was it frustration? Patience? Fury? “So the violence is arousing?”

Loki stiffened at the question, not having expected Thor to dissect his words. He was ill used to an attentive Thor, preferring the blundering oaf he might manipulate into the corner and take advantage of. Perhaps Loki had been the one with poor attentiveness all along. He frowned at the thought. “Perhaps.”

“And, in a hypothetical situation where the violence were arousing, it is only arousing when y- when one believes it is real?” Thor asked, all the while his blue eyes still fixated on Loki. He was careful to keep it in the hypothetical, his best chance at Loki gifting him a real answer. 

“Perhaps.” Loki put a little more force into the word. Thor nodded, recognizing the response as the closest he would get to a yes. 

Thor stood up. He hesitated, almost wishing it didn't have to be real, but then, it wouldn't be Loki if it were any other way. He took in a long inhale.

Thor closed the distance between them and grabbed his brother by his outstretched hand, smirking to himself as Loki's eyebrows shot up in surprise. Loki bristled, but there, for the briefest of seconds before the fury, was the involuntary shudder.

“You really are incorrigible,” Thor said firmly, a smile openly playing across his lips. His other hand secured Loki's throat, tilting the other man's head up. 

Loki shifted in Thor's grasp, testing the restraint. He cleared his throat and settled into stillness, awaiting Thor's next move. “And why is that?” Loki said.

“I did not think warprizes wore so many clothes,” Thor said with a dark laugh. 

Loki remained surprisingly silent. 

“Well, at least, mine does not. Especially when he is a Jötun prince, groomed all his life to be royalty. Born to be a king,” Thor whispered heatedly, bringing his lips next to Loki's ear for effect. “And instead after the war he ends up here, my slave, just like he has always imaged.” Thor drew out the words, hoping to remind Loki of one of the first lies of the morning after, when Loki had pretended to be daydreaming about being raised Jötun. “Just like he always feared.” Thor nipped Loki's ear, only releasing when he heard his brother gasp. 

Thor forced himself to lose his smile, a difficult task when he felt Loki's heart-rate increase. Had it been anyone else Thor might have worried that he was being too forceful, but no longer seidr-bound, Loki could have him flat on his back with a whisper. The knowledge of that real safe word kept Thor at task and attentive. “Here to do my bidding. You are going to fulfil my every desire,” Thor growled. 

Loki opened his mouth to speak. Thor shifted his grip on his neck, temporarily stifling his words. “Ah, ah,” Thor tutted. “Let us not wear that silver tongue out just yet. I have other uses in mind for it.” He tightened his hand on Loki's neck for emphasis before letting go. 

Thor took a step backwards and made a show of looking Loki up and down. 

“Strip,” Thor demanded.

Loki arched an eyebrow, glancing around at the vast expanse of the great hall. 

“No one will come in,” Thor assured him. 

Loki began to unbutton his pants. 

“Not yet anyways,” Thor said, which caused Loki momentary pause. 

Thor almost hesitated at his brother's uncharacteristic silence. How long had he gone in Loki's presence without hearing his biting tongue? His wrath, wreaking out in every syllable? How Thor longed to pause the game, to ascertain that this was indeed what Loki wanted, but he stopped himself, for fear of ruining the fragile ground. 

“There will be an audience when I defile you on the royal throne,” Thor promised with a dark smirk. 

“Or when I-” Loki's words were cut off by Thor's hand roughly fisting in Loki's hair and jerking it. 

“On your knees,” Thor demanded. 

Loki sunk to his knees, staring up at Thor with dangerous red eyes. The look sent an involuntary shudder through Thor, knowing he would get back what he gave in kind, and then more. With Loki it was always more. 

“What fun I will have, teaching you obedience,” Thor said, letting the cold amusement flare in his words. “While we play here, and figure out the rules to our game,” Thor said, meaningfully staring at Loki as he used the plural. It was not just this singular game, with Thor in charge, but a game between them. A game in a place of dreams, where they could do anything, be anyone, until they figured out who they wanted to be. “because nothing else matters,” Thor promised. 

Thor swore, before his brother took his cock in his mouth, that he could see the failed repression of a smirk on his face. Thor would never be completely sure though that Loki hadn't let him see it, incapable of paying attention to anything but the feel of Loki's tongue as his brother deep throated him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for sticking through my first fanfiction! It definitely wasn't perfect, and I have a lot to improve on, but I learned a lot and so I would call this a success. 
> 
> This fic was a big struggle to balance and since it's over I thought I would share some of that with you! I initially wrote it as a gift and then quickly realized oh my gods I've never written anyone doing anything more than kissing before and now they're having anal. How do you write anal? How do you even write people touching? Is this the kind of sex the person I'm gifting this to would like? And then later realizing, no it's probably not, and feeling bad. Also there was a lot of, fuck, what is it like to experience sexual attraction? Being asexual is confusing. I should have researched that before I started writing porn!!! All while exploring how dark Loki can go while still being a likable protagonist. So... ideally it looked a lot smoother on the reader side of things, and if not, hopefully it provided a good laugh. ;)
> 
> This fic is part of a series (title subject to change if I can think of a better one) and I expect to come back and write a second fic some point in the future. So far my only plans are lots and lots of kinky sex in warprize au dreamland. Until then I'm going to work on some very specific writing skills and do a lot of one shots. 
> 
> Thanks again for reading and if you ever want to chat about this fic, or whatever, I'm cantheysuffer on tumblr <3


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